“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... optimism of some of the earlier reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass ...”

“... and ill-will one may suspect them to be. There is a tenacity in Lewes as ‘an old-fashioned French barber or dancing master’, or Forster as ‘the toady of Sir E.L. Bulwer and Mr Macready’, which has not made the difficult project of embracing their careers any more attractive. The two books which have taken up these long-standing biographical ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... occupying powers a set of tasks. Creating a counter-narcotics directorate fell to the UK. (The French train the officer corps, the Germans train the border police, the Japanese try to get the warlords to disarm and Italy is charged with building the judiciary.) The poppy question might now be moving up the list of priorities, however. The first signs came ...”

“... contracts. ‘More important for France than the back debt would be oil contracts . . . The French oil giant Total has been negotiating to explore and develop two sites in Iraq,’ the Washington Post noted on 17 December. In Berlin, the commitment Baker won was vaguer, perhaps because Germany has less interest in oil contracts. Asked about the ...”

“... making nonsense of many passages that follow. (The original distinction survives in the French translation, Ciel de nuit: ‘avait du sang nègre’.) In his posthumous memoir, Kafka Was the Rage (1993), Broyard avoids referring to his black family, who lived outside Manhattan. A facile view is that he was ashamed of being black; an alternative one ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before the war by the museum authorities at the behest of Saddam. Two days later, in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch seconded Cruickshank, and right-wing commentators in the US took up the story. Later that month, many of the same media figures used part of a statement by Donny George, the director of the Iraq Museum, to bury the story that had embarrassed the ...”

“... were in the Guardian’s hands. The government soon realised how wrong that was, and on 18 August David Miranda, Greenwald’s partner, en route from Berlin to Rio, was taken aside at Heathrow and held under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. He was, they believed, carrying an encrypted copy of at least some of the Snowden documents, the estimated number of ...”

“... what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ‘rococo’, derived from ‘self-consciousness and reading’ and in some instances made ‘more than usually irritating by meagre content spread ...”

“... ago in London, during the winter of 1789. Frosty weather – the widower is warm against ‘the French insurrection’. Christmas Day takes him to church. Three years go by, and on the same day the same church receives him. ‘It vexed me that even on the festival of Christmas I was melancholy. I went with my son James to St George’s, Hanover Square, and ...”

“... book, Girard, a professor at Stanford, was at number 14 in the magazine Lire’s hitparade of French intellectuals, while Derrida and Baudrillard were 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 ...”

“... controversy and generated intense public interest. Ian Dowbiggin’s piece of hereditarianism in French Psychiatry from 1840-90 (Volume One) explains how the concept of morbid heredity served the interests of the profession at a time when it was under attack from various sections of French society. It promoted professional ...”