“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... There is a good answer in the argument James conducted with W.K. Clifford, brilliantly explored by David Hollinger in an essay in The Cambridge Companion to William James. Clifford had said that it is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence, a claim James thought ‘thoroughly fantastic’ because it excluded most human action most of the ...”

“... mood of a particular time and class. His protagonists fret about la vie quotidienne (they use the French) – ‘What made us think that we could escape things like bankruptcy, alcoholism, being disappointed, having children?’ – as well as their feelings of political powerlessness. ‘I make small campaign contributions to the candidate of my choice and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”