“... devotee of the Bond books.) The author of Moscow Gold, ‘John Salisbury’, is in propria persona David Caute, present literary editor of the New Statesman. I don’t give anything away here, since the fact was divulged, with much nudging and winking, in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column of the Evening Standard – where the marriage of Barnes and Kavanagh ...”

“... the minister of foreign affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville; and the new general secretary of the French Communist Party, Waldeck Rochet. From there, Lippmann flew to Rome, where he met diplomats from the Vatican and leaders of the Italian Communist Party. When he returned, he went to the White House to explain the nature of the European alliance to Johnson ...”

“... writing his only history of science. It is still more surprising that it should come from David Wootton, an early modern intellectual historian whose 1983 study of Paolo Sarpi, a late Renaissance theologian, concluded by cautioning historians not to act as a ‘jury’. There are two stories folded into Wootton’s Bad Medicine: one concerns the ...”

“... meaning a form of truth which he considered to be particular to the cinema. The term, in its French form, has been widely adopted, but almost equally widely misconstrued as denoting a cinema of some sort of absolute truth, which is why Rouch himself later abandoned it. David MacDougall is one of the leading ...”

“... Life of an Ordinary Man, the posthumous memoir pieced together by the publisher and journalist David Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted ...”

“... in a house across the pasture. Lisa Marie adored her Southern family; the fried chicken, grits and French fries that the Graceland chefs would make at any hour of the day; the stormy weather that seemed to reflect her father’s changing moods. In this telling, Elvis is gregarious, nocturnal, prone to volcanic rages and tender gestures. Lisa Marie is a tiny ...”

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”

“... the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Merkel has moved successfully to circumvent the will of French and Dutch voters, but was in no position to accomplish this on her own: for that, governments in Paris and the Hague were necessary. The prospects of any informal German hegemony in Europe, classically considered, seem at present remote. Part of the reason ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... packet of tampons; a plastic bag containing white granules like coarse salt, with instructions in French; a liquid soap dispenser; three pairs of women’s pants; a bag of cotton-wool balls; a pink sock; two child-sized pairs of jeans; a pink top next to trousers and a towel in the same colour; a bedspread with red and yellow hearts on it; a green plastic ...”

“... classified as lithophytes (stony plants) by Linnaeus in the early 18th century. Then, in 1752, the French ‘physician-botanist’ Jean-André Peyssonnel sent a treatise to the Royal Society from Guadeloupe. Peyssonnel showed that corals were not, despite appearances, plants, but colonies of tiny animals. As one reader noted with admiration, Peyssonel’s work ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... orthodoxy and censoriousness, impartially including ‘Madame Vendler’s Chamber of Horrors’, French theory, and ‘the deformed, uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism’. It opposes them, much less specifically, with what would appear a libertarian, childlike, very late Romantic poetry of ‘the body’, ‘the voice’ and ‘the new ...”

“... link that binds John Major, via the Desert Rats, to Desert Storm. It is easy to find news of the French, the Kuwaitis and other participants in Bush’s international brigade – or is it General Schwartzkopf’s, since Bush, in a chilling moment, announced that he would leave the conduct of the war to the military? Of the poor Brits, we hear barely a ...”

“... chiefly with altarpieces and altarpieces must also play a central part in any history of Italian, French or Spanish art of the three centuries which followed. It is therefore surprising that, before the translation of Burckhardt’s essay, Das Altarbild, there was no book in English tracing the origins and early evolution of this art form, and describing its ...”