“... in 1956, its assets impounded and its members pursued through the courts. Unlike in Italy or France, Germany’s social democrats had no rivals on the left. When Willy Brandt took office in 1969 as the first postwar SPD chancellor, he did so in coalition with the liberal, free-market FDP. The coalition governments of Brandt and Helmut Schmidt changed the ...”

“... move to the Pyrenees, where they discover a ‘little, English meadow, locked in the arms of France’, and set about rebuilding the house which could no longer be sustained in the deteriorated nation that had once been home. In a way that Rybczynski the DIY architect might appreciate, the Pleydells choose to do without the expertise of professional ...”

“... of the first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...”

“... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... the judges, seize the banks and instruct the king to dismiss his ministers and end the war with France. This plot was the invention of Robert Watt, who until a year earlier had been a spy in the pay of Dundas, and who perhaps even now was acting on Dundas’s instructions as an agent provocateur. Dundas disowned him, however, and Watt was charged with high ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... My mother was sitting on some steps down to the sea in Monte Carlo or somewhere in the south of France. Walking down those steps to the sea was a man I’d only heard of from my mother. It was Douglas Fairbanks Jr. A playboy who lived in a mansion and played as boys with rich mothers and fathers do. My mother was posing, with one leg pointing downwards to ...”

“... strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight years: grouchy, standoffish, a dissipated cleric. Ghosting everyone, ghosting poetry itself, Rimbaud stops writing aged nineteen and disappears like a magician’s ...”

“... Europe. Each successful coup by Hitler made the imbalance worse, until the point was reached when France and Britain were compelled to stand and fight; after Munich the risk of war became enormous. But Hitler was prepared to take it. The immediate cause was his policy of increasing Germany’s power, like Bismarck, by picking quarrels. While hoping to get ...”

“... being the waiter; he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off he was in such a state.’ When Freud was ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... Catholicism with the actual Church.The artistic re-envisioning of Catholicism really began in France. Its Decadents offered a more attractive model for writers and artists than John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, that solemn tale of backing out of one spiritual cul-de-sac after another. The Decadents likened the Mass to Wagner’s operas as a ...”

“... coffee plantations, and a handful threw in their lot with the FNLA. But the ethnic strains, which David Birmingham describes very well in his new history of Angola, were too great for this arrangement to last: in 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an ambitious and volatile character, left the FNLA to embark on a venture of his own, Unita (União Nacional para a ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”

“... forestall their [defection] or to cover their trail.’ Perhaps. Yet it was the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for ...”