“... at the 90 per cent collectors is indicative. Morris Louis and Jules Olitski had one-man shows at French & Co that year, with Cubist structure and physical wallops of paint deliberately nowhere to be seen. There was a show of Roy Lichtenstein at Condon Riley in June, still safely Ab Ex. But something was happening. A young man called Frank Stella had a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”