“... 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 ...”

“... in Anglophone writing: what Henry James called ‘the dear, the blessed nouvelle’. But the French term reminds us of the currency the novella has had in Europe, and that Hamid has said he was drawn to the genre by way of Camus’s The Fall. This makes things more complicated, not least because we can’t set up an easy opposition between Anglophone ...”

“... written down for Her Majesty by a courtier. So when in The Uncommon Reader the queen questions the French president about Genet it has some (though 50-year-old) foundation in fact. And it’s sheer coincidence. In 2007 when I wrote the story I had no knowledge of Berlin’s correspondence, the relevant volume of which was only published this year. I chose ...”

“... left-wing nationalists and Communists in North Yemen to flee to Aden. There, British soldiers, French veterans from Algeria and Belgian mercenaries were recruited by Colonel David Stirling’s company, Watchguard International Ltd, for operations behind enemy lines. In the South too the nationalists were divided, with ...”

“... correspondent and the only American journalist to remain ‘embedded’ throughout the 1849 French siege of Rome. Yet Lowell proposes, not inappropriately, a more fundamental first-ness, and his question mark is apt in ways Fuller herself would have understood. The greatest contradiction she experienced within herself, and one that, by Capper’s ...”

“... Merely between 1930 and 1934, while trying to make up her mind whether to commit herself to the French political journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, she covered the League of Nations for the St Louis Post-Dispatch (she was to give the ‘woman’s angle’, which did not interest her, though the spectacle of power did); crossed America coast to coast, for $25 ...”

“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... necessary to his Christianisation of Saxony. By the 18th century, however, that no longer washed. French as well as German writers were appalled by the barbarian warlord whom Voltaire called ‘a thousandfold murderer’, and in the 19th century the events at Verden made Charlemagne a problematic hero for German nationalists. The issue was revisited by ...”

“... if not beyond criticism, beyond dispraise. ‘I am not unbiased about Israel,’ he writes to David Astor in 1958, ‘I like them all, or nearly all, too well, & think that despite their faults and crimes they have developed a form of life … which is morally more attractive than any that I’ve seen elsewhere, because it is egalitarian without being ...”

“... younger, who in the mid-1960s in London brought Cunningham to dinner with the photographer David Montgomery, and Montgomery who gave him the first camera he started using seriously. (Cunningham is a key figure in the new documentary on Lopez, Ramos and their crowd, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco; it was his last interview, and the film is ...”

“... made Earthsea change. What’s surprising is that it took her so long to do it. She had a PhD in French literature and was married to a historian of France. She must have heard the wave of post-structuralist theory gathering force well before it hit the West Coast in the early 1970s and washed away any residue of the magical belief that things and their ...”

“... they included Brian Worthington, a former pupil of Leavis, and, for a short but inspiring time, David Lambert, a man who spoke about poetry and nature with such passion that it was no surprise when he left Clifton to become a gardener. He later c0-founded the Parks Agency and is now a compelling advocate for Extinction Rebellion.Jefferies taught with a ...”

“... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man ...”