“... 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 ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... gods.’ Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Moravia, started writing poems under the influence of French Surrealism. The poems quickly squared their shoulders and became paragraphs: prose poems, epiphanic jottings, broken anecdotes. The Prague Revue (No. 5) recently printed a number of these early poems, written in the 1940s, and many of them are touched with ...”

“... won the day. To cite Berlin’s own litany, we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby ...”

“... violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption’. According to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, after the fall of Saddam the Iraqis succumbed to their native ‘demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise … even in the face of self-immolation’. Liberal hawks such as Leon Wieseltier believe much the same ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... take up a quieter life. But once Il Magnifico was dead and his son Piero was in charge – with French troops bearing down on the city and Savonarola preaching in the pulpit – not even the philosophers were safe. Pico and his friend Angelo Poliziano were assassinated. Pico was 31. Their bodies were exhumed in 2007 and poisoning by arsenic confirmed (in ...”

“... about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... off Norway with quota to spare only to get a message from his company saying that because a French vessel had overfished, the Norwegians were cutting the quota of another EEC boat – which happened to be his. The only way he could cover his costs was to take his trawler into the perilous waters of the Arctic, above the 72nd parallel.Hardie doesn’t ...”

“... counterpart in any other North African country. The abolition of the RCD signified the end of what French analysts called the ‘parti-état’. It meant that Tunisian society was heading into terra incognita, constitutionally and politically. But when the Egyptian demonstrators destroyed the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, they ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”