“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... In​ Le Désordre AZERTY (2014), a collection of writings based on the layout of a French computer keyboard, the novelist Éric Chevillard wrote: Literature, more than the zoo, makes it its mission to be a conservatory of animal life … could anybody go without this vocabulary: warthog, elephant, orangutan, gorilla, stork, anaconda, babirusa, dugong, manatee, beetle, tarantula, octopus, camel, hummingbird, chickadee, osprey, chameleon, alligator, rhinoceros, kangaroo ...”

“... is without precedent. This is the argument of More and More and More, the latest book by the French historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the ...”

“... or that its history mirrors that of Jewish migrations, is a trope of modern antisemitism. As David Nirenberg put it in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), the association of Judaism with worldliness and money is ‘as ancient as Christianity itself’. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance ...”

“... too had a friend called Beamish, Noelle Beamish, an Irish lesbian lady who lived in the same French village during the war and left her long, utilitarian drawers out to dry beside her younger companion’s little frilly knickers. On the way back I know that I will miss lunch in the Conrad so I turn, hardly thinking at all, into the new foyer of the ...”

“... speaking English and Spanish; he lived in Geneva between the ages of 15 and 22, speaking English, French and Spanish. O’Brien spoke only Irish until the age of nine or ten, when he began to speak English as well; he wrote in both English and Irish. Each of these writers made up new names for himself. Pessoa became, among others, Ricardo Reis, Alberto ...”

“... on the make, Raffles wanted to make up for lost time. He took part in the invasion of French-controlled Java in 1811 and ruled it for three years as lieutenant-governor. With a talent for engineering inter-elite intrigues and massacres, he made considerable headway in bringing the sultans of the island to submission. He ransacked the ancient city ...”

“... only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies. In Paris he was a celebrity. French writers and American expatriates flocked to the Café Monaco, where he held court a short walk from his Left Bank flat. ‘Dick greeted everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king ...”

“... older than him, and was Maud Gonne’s daughter with the right-wing (and deeply anti-semitic) French politician Lucien Millevoye. (Iseult had had an affair with Ezra Pound before Francis married her; in 1917 Yeats had proposed marriage to her.) Stuart published poetry which Yeats admired. He fought on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and was ...”

“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”

“... inspired such an outpouring of accomplished writing, from Wrong to Gérard Prunier, from Howard French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... impressive and modern-seeming. I’ve no notion whether the sculptor was English or French though, as R. says, if it were in a German church he would certainly be known as the Master of the Crusader Tomb. What contributes to its freshness is that whereas a nearby 15th-century tomb is covered in centuries of graffiti, the knight, perhaps because ...”

“... and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’ His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the US, and devout Christian Scientists. He ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”