“... had been forced to go in search of foreign aid. After Guinea rejected an offer to remain in the French community and retain the colonial currency, France responded with Opération Persil, a covert plan to destabilise Touré’s government through economic and military sabotage. He could only hope to mitigate the damage with assistance from Warsaw Pact ...”

“... be attached to his intrepid voyage? Of the natives he first observed in ‘Hispaniola’, as David Brading’s book records, Colombo wrote: ‘They do not have arms and are all naked and with no ability for war and are very cowardly, so that a thousand could not resist three [Castilians] and thus they are fit to be commanded and made to work and to sow ...”

“... one very quick’); then there is the play on the word ‘sun’ – sun, son, but also son (the French for sound and the name of an Afro-Cuban folksong form); finally comes the essential ‘male’ theme (the history of the island traced through fathers and sons), which restores a little dignity to the Barbadian men who figured so slightly and so ...”

“... you discomfit somebody you do rather more than make him uncomfortable. On page 109 a passage of French has gone wrong and on page 138 ‘exultation’ should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I ...”

“... that somebody has a legal obligation in England on the ground that he would not have one under French law; and it would betray confusion to deny that a legal system was valid because one thought that many of the laws in it were bad. On a parallel analysis of morality, two adherents of the same adequate moral system could disagree about its implications in ...”

“... every case of apparent simultaneity a story with a political dimension. It was largely to assuage French fury at claims made on Adams’s behalf that Le Verrier was given the Copley Medal – two years before Adams was so honoured. References to simultaneous discovery cannot be taken on trust because they often reflect a smoothing operation on the part of ...”

“... that Gomulka sought a ‘national way’, and he may have intended the sort of pluralism that the French Communist Party used to speak of in the early 1970s, meaning tolerance for parties of the Left; and, as Ascherson argues, he did create conditions in which the Stalin era was less bloody and shorter than elsewhere. But Gomulka always had to contend with ...”

“... it even if it is the size of a tablecloth.’ At the same time, the Zionist leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, were adept at presenting the Palestinian position as unreasonable. It is not that they weren’t interested in a compromise solution. But since the claims of the two sides could not be reconciled, it was preferable to have the Palestinians ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... most important new acquaintance was the novelist Thomas Flanagan, who later wrote The Year of the French. ‘When I landed in California,’ Heaney says, ‘my head was still basically wired up to English Literature terminals … When I left, thanks mostly to Tom’s brilliantly sardonic Hibernocentric thinking, I was in the process of establishing new ...”

“... decision during the Korean War to push to the Yalu river after capturing Pyongyang. He covers French campaigns in Indochina and the Algerian war of independence – at one point described as France’s ‘counterterrorism campaign in Algeria’. His chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis provides good detail on the naval blockade, and on the American ...”

“... how he does it. ‘You can speak to me two times a half, three if I’m having a bad game,’ the French referee Romain Poite told the former Wales and Lions captain Sam Warburton – an edict Warburton said was the best captaincy advice he was ever given. This rule is simply and unequivocally better than football’s chaotic free-for-all and I can’t see ...”

“... insists on O’Hara’s early and conscious study – of Williams, Gertrude Stein and the modern French poets. Russians, perhaps, became just as important. ‘A True Account’ is a response to a Mayakovsky poem; O’Hara elsewhere praised Mayakovsky’s verse and saw in himself the Soviet poet’s fragility, writing in a poem called ‘Mayakovsky’: Now I ...”

“... the ‘black soil’ region of what is now Ukraine supplied the world with wheat. The British and French blockade of Odessa during the Crimean War made the world realise it needed to diversify wheat supplies; Kansas and Nebraska rushed to meet the need. Odessa was also one of the centres of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, with the proportion of Jews ...”

“... being introduced to Latin at the age of four and Greek two years later, before becoming fluent in French and German, immersing himself in history, science and philosophy and starting to read Kant when he was eight. If he was not quite such a prodigy as Mill, he certainly had the advantage in terms of happiness. His childhood was spent in a kind of bohemian ...”