“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... have been explained diplomatically, as the Henrician regime sought to counter the danger of a French-Imperial alliance by negotiating with the German Lutheran princes; and politically, as reformers and conservatives jostled for control of the king’s mind and conscience, Cranmer and Cromwell versus Bishop Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk. Bernard ...”

“... Coetzee: Beckett and Celan. This is how we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan Swift whispering ghostly in his ear, was in the process of perfecting for himself, lyrical and mordant in equal measures’. And are told that Celan’s poem ‘Death Fugue’makes two huge implicit claims about ...”

“... the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day. There were ambushes, counter-ambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over water to land on the other side.’In ...”

“... Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel Beau-Site was commandeered by the French government and turned into a hospital. This, together with the wartime rent controls imposed on landlords, made the family finances suddenly precarious. The maids, to whom Tippett was attached, were dismissed and at the age of nine he was packed off to ...”

“... dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.’) In Britain’s War Machine, David Edgerton makes the plausible judgment that ‘no scientist ever had more influence in British history; and probably no academic either.’* The Churchill who decided these matters was almost always a Churchill-Lindemann hybrid. Decision-making with respect ...”

“... He also took against the Corsicans, who combined ‘the worst qualities of the Italians and the French’. Later, when he was nearly forty and owned a house in Verbier, he delivered his opinion on the Swiss, or, as he put it, ‘the goddam Swiss’: they were, he wrote, ‘the ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He ...”

“... comic character. There’s nothing in the slightest bit original about lampooning modish French intellectualism, and God knows cod Baudrillard is as dated as cod Irvine Welsh, but there’s some vitality here, more perhaps than there’s meant to be. A paradox is only a platitude on a seesaw, and Didier never tires of bouncing up and down. He’s ...”

“... the professional historians descend like a flight of moths and leave these silken myths in shreds. French generals explained their defeat in 1940 by blaming the politicians for their failure to re-arm in the early Thirties. But Bradford Lee shows that the arms they had at their disposal were the product of years of debate about tactics in the field; and though ...”

“... whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”