“... a peasant nation like France, it is better to have someone whose origins, modest though they may be, lie deep in the entrails of our soil, rather than a subtle Talmudist.’ During the war Blum was imprisoned, first in France, then at Buchenwald and Dachau. He died in 1950. Birnbaum, a well-known historian and sociologist of French Jewry, has written a ...”

“... ensuring that they remained ever present, with devastating consequences for the future. It may seem far-fetched to argue that so much lasting damage was done by the strategy adopted by a dictatorship which ended so long ago. But it isn’t if we bear in mind two factors. First, that while Francoism managed to absorb huge economic and social ...”

“... go ooh-aah, and oh no oh no oh no along with the action. The manuscript of Tales of the Marvellous may date from the 14th century, which would make it older than what is thought to be the earliest existing manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights. It’s missing its title page, and the table of contents shows that only 18 stories out of the original 42 have ...”

“... edition rather than Caxton’s; Reynard was also the subject of magic-lantern slides. The fox may have migrated to America, and disguised himself as Br’er Rabbit; more than a dozen episodes from the Uncle Remus stories are lifted from the Roman de Renart and the Reynaert de Vos. (Though one wouldn’t want to give Reynard credit for everything: Br’er ...”

“... revolutions … which we can meet with in ancient or modern history’. Burke agreed: ‘The Court may assume as uncontrolled a power in this country as the king of Sweden has done in his.’ Might George III become another Gustavus III? Although Burke ended up an enemy of popular revolt, he spent much of his life in politics as the foe of prerogative. Bourke ...”

“... killing of 13 demonstrators in October 2000, to Benjamin Netanyahu’s election day warning last May: ‘Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organisations are busing them out.’ The spectre of ‘Arab voters’ was hardly new: the Israeli right has never looked fondly on Arabs exercising their voting rights, unless they can be ...”

“... of our religion and the shame of our country.’ England’s political and commercial elite may have been able to stomach trade with the ‘Turk’, but there is no getting around the deep-rooted (if ill-informed) antipathy shared by large swathes of the population. Their attitude is reflected by Portia’s response in The Merchant of Venice, when the ...”

“... what happens in front of the real thing: the pictures are not chambers of horrors. Their detail may regularly be disgusting or tawdry or delectable (almost in the way of Baudelaire’s ‘Une charogne’), but by and large it is firmly contained, almost neutralised, by the whole painted rectangle, that is, by the ordinariness of the ...”

“... wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ‘torrenting’, ‘blasting’, ‘hot-rocking’ or ‘up-skirting’. People hang out at Porkies (a restaurant), Jester (a ...”

“... his conservative military outlook. Contact was established thanks largely to Jean Moulin, and in May 1943 the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR) was set up, bringing together all the main Resistance movements with de Gaulle as its head, even if this was something of a marriage of convenience. For the Resistance groups, alignment with de Gaulle brought ...”

“... atmosphere and its pressure have not always been the same, then the size and shape of the organism may likewise have been subject to manifold changes.’ Cosmos analyses the features of the natural world, the relationships between them, and the power of human perception to appreciate them, whether in science or art or religion. Humans also had the capacity to ...”

“... the Whitney has chosen only one. Warhol used three photographs from a Life magazine photo-essay of May 1963 which documented a civil rights march in Birmingham, Alabama, and, specifically, the attempt of one man to escape the police and their dogs. In the prints Warhol dispenses with the verbal frame of caption and headline, and variously rearranges the ...”

“... up. Perhaps this won’t last. The website of the Stroke Association warns that although aphasics may not recover the ability to speak in full sentences, ‘it’s usually possible for other people to understand what they mean. This can be very ...”

“... deeply, in every sense, in books as things to handle, dress up and display. In his diary for 15 May 1660, he records visiting ‘a bookseller’s and bought for the love of the binding three books’ – some French psalms, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, Thomas Farnaby’s Index Rhetoricus – and on 3 February 1665 notes with a mix of pride and ...”

“... from the West’s perspective, other than through its Ottoman rulers. The term ‘Middle East’ may have emerged after 1918, but that didn’t imply any confidence about how to shape it. It is arguable that in 1914 the British idea of the region was less coherent than it had been a hundred years before. In the early 19th century most knowledge of it had ...”