“... Barzani had marshalled significant support not only from the US but from Iran and – thanks to David Ben-Gurion’s ‘periphery doctrine’, which advocated alliances with non-Arab forces in the region – from Israel too. Increased military assistance, advice and training turned a local insurgency into a regional conflict by proxy. When the Baath took ...”

“... Walton. The most plausible model for Day’s master, the fictional Earl of Wessex – a title now held by Prince Edward, who is supposed to have chosen it after watching Colin Firth play a character called Lord Wessex in the film Shakespeare in Love – is the Earl of Ilchester. Whenever Hardy first heard of the courser, the critical fact is that in his ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Vermeer – I started to stumble. It may seem notable that, say, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her ...”

“... essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, as well as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Two decades later, the question shaped Chomsky’s response to the ...”

“... to two Angolan women called Esperance and Brancke; Bastiaan Ferdinando of São Tomé (an island held by the Portuguese in the Gulf of Guinea) to Maria Bastiaans from Angola. Serafina and Bastiaan witnessed the marriage of Anthony from Angola to Leonora Fonçeka of Brazil. Soon, the children of these unions began to appear in the baptismal records of the ...”

“... satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s account of her life is in tune with the ...”

“... For years, the historical society responsible for the site quibbled with local activists who held that it was important to memorialise the fact that Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved woman forced to work for Washington, had lived there too, and to let people visit her quarters. The President’s House is a mile north-east of the former Frederick Douglass ...”

“... that they would be allowed to leave the Great Bitter Lake and were anxious that they might be held to ransom indefinitely by the Egyptian government.They were right to worry. There was a precedent for seafarers being made legally responsible for their ships and detained. Just fifty miles away, Muhammad Aisha, a Syrian seafarer, was being forced to remain ...”

“... preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared they would become ‘other-directed’ conformists, incapable of the generosity, independence and energy that democratic government required. In England, Tocqueville’s work was ...”

“... every sign of exemplifying Cyril Connolly’s ‘theory of permanent adolescence’. A nasty David Benedictus-like episode, with prefect ‘Dick’ going too far in wielding the Ground Ash, leads to a new school mandate for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime ...”

“... whose recent work is shown to supports hers are Marc Shell, Kurt Heinzelman, Jerome Christensen, David Simpson, Heather Glen, Paul Magnuson, Lucy Newlyn, Raimonda Modiano and Alan Liu. Titles which reflect their common interests include Heinzelman’s The Economics of Literature and Modiano’s ‘The Ethics of Gift Exchange and Literary Ownership’. To ...”