“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently of their catastrophe. But in 1950, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law which still forbids Selma Tawil and the other 750,000 Palestinians from ever returning – if they left their homes in ...”

“... Evans would have felt keenly. In his American exile, he has never been short of work, and has held a bewildering variety of magazine and publishing jobs, which he writes about with his usual puppyish enthusiasm (‘the galaxy of writers in the history of Random House was stunning,’ he says, before listing 28 names from the galaxy). Even so, between ...”

“... book will undoubtedly become the standard account of the Russian aspect of the Napoleonic wars. David Bell has recently argued that Napoleon introduced ‘total war’ to Europe. Following the 1789 Revolution, all male Frenchmen, on reaching a certain age, were called up as citizens to the armed forces. As a result of the levée en masse the French army ...”

“... drink at the weekends only – standard alcoholic strategy – and during an engagement party we held for some friends from her law school I drank several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero (the party was Spanish-themed) I had found at a good case-price. I remember eyeing my wife as she sat on our couch next to a handsome young attorney. She was ...”

“... to read before they could write, but some may have recognised only the letters in their own name. David Cressy’s research on England suggests a gradual, if uneven, climb in male sign literacy, from 10 per cent in 1500 to 45 per cent in 1714 and 60 per cent in 1750. Female sign literacy lagged behind male, but rose steeply from a shockingly low base of 1 per ...”

“... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...”

“... narrow: was Hillary: The Movie actually a movie? But the court didn’t rule narrowly. Instead, it held that it was unconstitutional for the FEC to prevent Citizens United – or indeed almost any association – from spending its own money (as much as it wanted) on political campaigning (whenever it liked). After all, what is a political campaign but an ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... loomed over her in the second debate. By figures on both the right and the left, Clinton was held to be more responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration, responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda rather than she his. The ...”

“... much time in the city of Cluj, where she had formed a passionate friendship with the historian David Prodan. The Securitate meanwhile had decided that with a name like Verdery she must be an ethnic Hungarian (quite wrong: the family roots were French), and therefore had been planted to encourage subversion among the disaffected Magyar minority in ...”

“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”

“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”

“... of a handful of Ashbery’s poems – which he had read at the ‘special poetry class’ Boyden held for the best students – to Deerfield’s ‘resident writer’, a not very able poet called David Morton, who was so impressed that he sent them to Poetry magazine, which accepted two of them. The poems appeared in the ...”