“... 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 ...”

“... visible to us.Is the colossus protecting the people, or is it him they fear? Does he symbolise the French armies wreaking havoc across the Spanish hills or Spain standing up to the invaders? If the giant is Spain, which Spain is he: the Bourbons demanding restoration or the liberal republicanism that flared briefly at the time Goya was ...”

“... Prime Minister, who, as in her invocation of ‘Victorian Values’ – or her strictures on the French Revolution – is continually calling up shades of the national past. Her interventions in the current debate are widely resented and interpreted in a sinister sense, but historians, while rejecting her precepts, might feel nattered and even encouraged by ...”

“... not be able to for many years.’ In the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright and Mark Hibbs analysed the situation and found several areas of nuclear weapon technology in which Iraq was deficient quite apart from its lack of usable fissile material. Nothing the IAEA inspectors have found so far in any way suggests that Iraq ...”

“... Gay has found so much unfamiliar material from so many provenances – English, American, French and German – that his book will be a major resource for fellow historians for a long time. He makes an important remark about the relation between his evidence and his conclusions at the outset of Education of the Senses: ‘The search for ...”

“... here is not really original – it probably owes a good deal to A High Wind in Jamaica and The French Lieutenant’s Woman – but it is used with an atmosphere and personality all its own. He makes history extremely funny, and true humour always sounds authentic. Young Fleury, the clever young man of fashion from England, who finds himself involved in the ...”

“... and others said about its intrinsic Englishness, was certainly a Continental and probably a French invention, but it was Brown who carried it to perfection and sent it back across the Channel as an integral part of the jardin anglais, in which open views across country and sloping lawns could be divided on the ground, while united to the eye. In his ...”

“... civility – attended by men and women anxious to ‘improve’ – rather than of vice. He begged David Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did ...”

“... Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be ...”