“... History, and in the local bookstore Jewish history covers more space than the whole of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and East European history combined. Memoirs, anthologies, coffee-table books, novels and textbooks run thickly from the presses. The high point was reached in the President’s Commission on the Holocaust appointed by Jimmy ...”

“... miles, been to the Pantheon, and sent me a picture of a McDonald’s billboard with a picture of French fries above the word ‘Gnammm’.I feel I have hardly left the house, or the inside of my own head, since Jason’s surgery last summer. Hope and I have, we have calculated, exactly 72 hours to be tourists. But the elements are against us – it’s ...”

“... the final volume of his masterpiece The City of London, which deals with the period 1945-2000, David Kynaston has observed that the City people in that book are more boring than in earlier volumes because all they do with their lives is work in finance. Simons wasn’t like that: his life had the range of the old-school giants. Born in ...”

“... not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or David Bowie. For many Scots, self-determination, rather than nationalism, remains the cause. Now, 35 years later, were I living in Scotland, I’d vote yes to independence, despite the short-term economic problems it would bring, and despite Salmond’s ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... to touch the ground, as one meeting followed another in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Washington, Camp David and Ottawa. As Sarotte says, the tempo was at times ‘unimaginable’. At the Ottawa conference in February 1990, which was supposed to be about aviation, Baker ‘managed in just one day … to speak at least five times each to both Genscher and ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... brilliance and annoyingness are perfectly bound. Often​ his character recalls both Larry David and Bertie Wooster. Many are the plans that Kafka makes in a manner that ensures their eventual unmaking. Over five years he courts, engages, un-engages, re-engages but never marries Felice Bauer, a woman with whom he spends less than 15 scattered and not ...”

“... by Assad’s government, which still holds the country’s seat at the United Nations. The US and French governments had no such invitation and their actions had no basis in international law. Before launching his intervention Putin had tried to persuade the Americans to work with him. The problem with the US-led coalition’s air strikes was that they were ...”

“... census data on the race or ethnicity of its citizens, yet racial discrimination plainly exists in French society. Does ‘white’ ethnic identity mean the same thing in all these contexts? On the other hand, by focusing on ‘the West’ – and within that construct, mainly on English-speaking countries – Kaufmann misses details that would further ...”

“... Street of ‘a Negro lad about eighteen years of Age’ called ‘Starling’ who ‘blows the French horn very well’. Between 1698, when the London-based Royal African Company’s monopoly on English trade in Africa was removed, and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, 2060 slave voyages to Africa were funded by merchants in Bristol.Bristol ...”