“... That was LSD. The study of brain chemistry was off to a colourful start. Around the same time, a French military surgeon was working with a drug company to develop an antihistamine. The drug turned out to be only weakly histaminic, but it had an unexpected and welcome side effect: it cleared mania and psychosis. This was Thorazine. An early story associated ...”

“... nation has experienced such comparatively stable development since its invention in 1707. The French and the Irish can assert their common identity (whether it exists or not) by reference to recent liberation from foreign rule, the Germans can celebrate their post-war resurgence and re-union, the Americans can coalesce around a particular version of the ...”

“... new-style matrioshka can also stand for what is sometimes gained in translation. For instance, the French open up Edgar Allan Poe and out pops Baudelaire. Here, what has been lost in translation – Poe’s energetic vapidity – represents an enormous gain. Equally, the new-style doll will cover plagiarism, the original sin. For example, Baudelaire’s ...”

“... and textually. His model of the poet is not classical, but Biblical: not Orpheus, but Solomon and David, the two chief authors of what Sidney described (conventionally) as ‘the poetical part of the Scripture’. Those Biblical models were the foundation of what has been called a ‘Protestant poetics’, which shaped English poetry from Sidney and Spenser ...”

“... incentive.’ In a magnificent Idler essay, he imagined an American Indian chief watching the French and the British prepare for the Battle of Quebec; turning to his own people, the chief denounces their conquerors:   Those invaders ranged over the continent, slaughtering in their rage those that resisted, and those that submitted, in their mirth. Of ...”

“... as if they/Could master all things.’ All this has a bearing on the before and after story that David Ellis wants us to take more seriously as the real story of Byron’s life. In Ellis’s view the summer of 1816, which he spent in Geneva, marked a turning point in Byron’s life. He was, Ellis tells us, acutely unhappy there, though the unhappiness had a ...”

“... bird with a broken wing.’ They were each allocated five rounds of ammunition. But, as one French Communist deputy told them in farewell, ‘What you lack in weapons you will make up for in courage.’ Orwell thought this was baloney. The opinions of the other volunteers, once they got to the front, varied, and Baxell juxtaposes them nicely. He quotes ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may ...”

“... Palestinian refugees at the camps of Sabra and Shatila. Under UN and of course US supervision, French troops had entered Beirut on 21 August in the aftermath of the siege and were later joined by US and other European forces. The PLO fighters were evacuated from Lebanon; and by the beginning of September Arafat and a small band of advisers and soldiers had ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... you can’t help thinking about the easy sort of patriotism Cartier-Bresson now elicits: he’s French, he’s familiar, he soaked up a century and worked in a medium that lends itself to fridge magnets. Of course, if we have become blasé about photography’s reach – in the world and into our homes – then Cartier-Bresson, art ...”

“... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

“... been a secret file on ‘Burns, Robt (cover code Mossgiel). Exciseman. Adverse trace: sympathy for French Revolution. Subject is sensitive and promiscuous. See verses passim.’ Politics were one thing, but did he ever long to read what government spies thought of him as a person? ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... But MEK members outside Iraq also displayed remarkable devotion to the cause. When in 2003 the French authorities detained Maryam Rajavi on terrorism charges (she was later released) ten MEK members around the world set themselves on fire in protest; two of them died. The MEK of course denies being a cult, though many outsiders – senior US military ...”