“... far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and intelligence system. The detonation of British and French nuclear weapons on Pacific atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated ...”

“... was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to the firm rather than McChrystal himself ...”

“... citizens of the Commonwealth in 1948. In his documentary The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, David Olusoga observed that the 1948 British Nationality Act was intended to attract Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who would be easily absorbed into the majority population, restoring Britain’s manpower after the war, while keeping it ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... overall failure, Motion himself supplies the required epitaph: ‘At a time when many English, French and Spanish contemporaries filtered the lessons of their predecessors through distinctly modern sensibilities, George remained studiously traditional. He chose revivalism where they opted for pastiche; he preferred lavish reduplication where they ...”

“... isolationist. German scholarship was much admired and emulated in the 19th century, as were French art and literature and Italian music. But political theory: no thank you. Britain had no need of doctrine, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary; nor, since there appeared to be no problem of the state, a doctrine of the state. Those writers who were ...”

“... are fairly recent. It has long been assumed that the niceties of theory are congenial to French Cartesians, and to Americans, whose literature, in any case, floats free of terrestrial commitment, but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... don’t lose their passport in the process. Rodgers goes on to address the Marxist arguments of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, which hold that postmodern cultural fragmentation is connected to the shift from the Fordist national economies of the first part of the 20th century to the post-Fordist global economy of the last part. In the Marxist view, the ...”

“... synchronised with the biblical narrative, and the problem had sharpened in 1655, when the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère published his Prae-Adamitae, alleging that the annals of other civilisations, including the American and the Chinese, went back far beyond the creation of Adam around 4000 BC. It followed, according to La Peyrère, that these ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... He was even against Parliamentary and electoral reform. Indeed, to William Lamb, as the great French historian Elie Halévy put it, ‘reform of any kind seemed impossible or dangerous.’ As a member of the cabinet which was carrying the Reform Bill through Parliament, Lamb, who was now Lord Melbourne and home secretary throughout the long ...”

“... but the Mathesons’ Continental travels in pursuit of rest cures allowed her to become fluent in French, German and Italian. In 1908 she joined the Society of Home Students in Oxford, where her father was a chaplain, and read for the Honours History School, specialising in the Renaissance. While women were not yet allowed to matriculate, she did well in ...”

“... up to be associated with it. Many of the military leaders of the First World War – Douglas Haig, David Beatty and Hamilton – were there, under the distant and autocratic leadership of Herbert Kitchener. The other great difference in 1898 was that there was no risk of repeating Gambier-Parry’s confusion of 1884. Every soldier and every newspaper reader ...”