“... 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 ...”

“... it took her so long to do it. She had a PhD in French literature and was married to a historian of France. She must have heard the wave of post-structuralist theory gathering force well before it hit the West Coast in the early 1970s and washed away any residue of the magical belief that things and their signifiers were united by intrinsic bonds. And a complex ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by other colonial peoples that had experienced genocide at the hands of European states including France and Britain. Germany announced that it would pay €1.1 billion over thirty years in development aid. Before colonisation, the Ovaherero and Nama had been rich in land, cattle and culture. Luipert puts it like this: ‘Development is the greatest Northern ...”

“... to Klain, ‘that there was no way to build a nationwide pluralistic democracy based in Kabul’. David Petraeus and other generals instead convinced Obama to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to pull out US troops and told an interviewer that he would feel ‘zero responsibility’ for what happened ...”

“... We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental question of future coexistence between Israel and the surrounding Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happy with this. I felt it leapfrogged over the matter ...”

“... not up to standard and returned – as well as an under-documented incidence of surrogate death.In France, Germany, most of Europe, surrogacy is illegal, but in the UK the law allows for ‘altruistic’ arrangements, with the exchange of ‘reasonable expenses’. In the US the law varies from state to state, with California the market leader and some ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies’, David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno’s father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on ...”

“... by Donald McWhinnie, in which Jack MacGowran had taken part. It was hearing this voice faintly in France through the ether as broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957 – reading an extract from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work, also directed by McWhinnie – that made Beckett begin to plan Krapp’s Last Tape, whose first title was ‘Magee ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... the Daily Telegraph. ‘They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking.’ On BFM TV in France: ‘We’re not talking about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime … We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.’ On ITV: ‘This is not a developing, Third World nation. This is Europe!’ It ...”

“... not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to independence, despite the short-term economic problems it would bring, and despite Salmond’s ...”

“... not so fortunate. He fled to the Weevers family’s country house at Monguilhem in the South of France, but, bored with rural life, moved to Toulouse, where he managed to eke out a living teaching and perhaps playing a little: he was hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight. In April 1944 he was caught in a round-up on the streets of Toulouse and taken to ...”