“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... In France​ , Chris Kraus wrote in an essay from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense ...”

“... Olympics and that she had had a hand in arranging a state consultancy job for a colleague. In France, 24th on the list, Jacques Chirac famously refused to resign in the face of claims that he had received substantial illegal payments for public works contracts while mayor of Paris and president of the Gaullist Party. In Poland (No. 49), soon after the ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin was returning from Paris in 1952 when the aeroplane – ‘it was an Air France: Air Chance is a better name’ – ‘caught fire and scenes of extraordinary panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the disaster that didn’t happen, at least to Berlin ...”

“... important speeches and fight important fights. She found that role exhausting as well as exciting. David Owen contends and Williams concedes that she let her new party down and damaged her own career by not fighting Warrington – which Roy Jenkins narrowly lost and Williams could certainly have won – in a by-election in spring 1981, when the SDP was riding ...”

“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... about than doping. Consider the example of cycling. Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour de France in 1903, won the race the next year too, before being stripped of his victory. He had resorted to the wonderfully simple and direct expedient of taking a train. (You might wonder how he got away with it the first time. The answer seems to be that the ...”

“... most of them American but some European (Italians like Piero Manzoni, Nouveaux réalistes in France). Among the indebted are the abstract painters Frank Stella, Robert Ryman and Brice Marden; Minimalists Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Morris; Conceptualists Sol LeWitt, Dorothea Rockburne and Mel Bochner; Post-Minimalists Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman ...”

“... kind can be like looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack, as Randall Lewis and David Reiley – two of an increasing number of economists working for tech firms – put it. There is greater confidence in ‘search ads’: the ads you are shown when you Google something of commercial interest. You are then lower in the funnel: you may be ...”

“... not its possible consequences, was published under the title ‘Accidental Heroes: Britain, France and the Libya Operation’. Military performance aside, Nato could claim ‘justifiable credit’: ‘whatever happens next in Libya, there can be no doubting that the allied air operation was critical to saving many innocent lives and removing a ...”

“... A low-income household in Britain is typically £3800 a year worse off than the equivalent one in France, something that makes a world of difference to the way this new inflationary crisis is experienced. Meanwhile, total household wealth (what people own, rather than what they make from wages) rose from three times GDP in the late 1980s to nearly eight times ...”

“... not even in the top 40. A decade later, Girard’s theory is still relatively little known outside France and California. But the theory is not difficult to summarise, for his several books – notably Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and The Scapegoat – develop only a single argument. Social order, he suggests, is ...”

“... were incapable of launching until they had expanded the Luftwaffe and captured forward bases in France and the Low Countries in the following year. Satellite reconnaissance of the kind we now take for granted would have dispelled much of Whitehall’s ignorance in 1939, just as it would have provided unmistakable warning of the surprise attacks launched by ...”

“... risks) of hypnosis and the nature of the hypnotic state, moves elegantly from an account of one of France’s more sordid murders, where the murderess claimed to be acting on hypnotic suggestion, to a thoroughly compelling account of the intellectual, social, political and sexual climate of late 19th-century France, and of ...”

“... where the main influence on population change was death, and to a lesser degree with that of France, where fertility combined with mortality as instruments of change. In an indirect way, this work adds an element of explanation to the problem of why it was in England that the Industrial Revolution took place. Clearly pre-industrial England had a ...”