“... on which they built a thirteen-room house called the Dell, where Austin, Mabel and her husband, David, established what seems to have been a largely harmonious ménage à trois. Mabel, much to her chagrin, never managed to meet the elusive poet face to face, although she claimed Dickinson enjoyed hearing her play the piano, and received from her a number of ...”

“... about the following incident, which must have taken place shortly after the Normandy landings. The French Resistance had captured an important collaborator, who was thought to have information that would be useful to the Allies. Hampshire was sent to interrogate him. When he arrived, the head of the Resistance unit told Hampshire he could question the man, but ...”

“... or charged with people-trafficking have been a group of Spanish volunteer lifeguards on Lesvos, a French farmer near the Italian border who let migrants sleep in caravans in his fields, and a Danish campaigner for children’s rights who gave a Syrian family a lift in her car.Europe is trying to exert control beyond its borders too. Its deal with ...”

“... last decisive electoral victory, they managed 40 per cent. Might the SPD be about to follow the French Socialist party into oblivion? The opening of this confusing new era in German politics is commonly dated to 2015. Russia’s annexation of Crimea divided both the German public and the political class. Germany’s identity in Europe was put in question by ...”

“... be so attractive is anyone’s guess, but one reason may be that it counters what many since the French Revolution have believed to be the corrosions of modern culture: the softened mores and weakened will, the subordination of passion to rationality, of fervour to rules. As an antidote to the deadening effects of contemporary life ...”

“... Brideshead has been built up is really adequate to the issues at stake. Conservative writers like David Watkin, Roger Scruton and, to a lesser extent recently, Gavin Stamp have worked with impressive zeal to see that every wretched tower block in the land is listed as a national monument to the reforming ambitions of 1945. They have also presented themselves ...”

“... possessed in his books and his reviews, the Olympian, Nabokovian grand view. I wished I was French or English. I hated the arguments. I always saw both sides and then could see above the whole thing, see how inevitable the mess had become, once that vast plain in the south of England, those huge fertile fields, began to produce a surplus and there was ...”

“... allowed him to follow them all through.His friends and scientific colleagues John Herschel and David Brewster pressed Talbot to focus for long enough to publish his findings. ‘I have often wondered,’ Herschel wrote to him in 1833, ‘that being, as I am aware you are, in possession of a number of curious & interesting things in optical science and ...”

“... undesirable side effects. Until the 19th century Delaware’s primary crop was tobacco. Then a French Huguenot called Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks ...”

“... and Tony Blair, but subsequent governments abandoned it. Major reforms in the mid-2010s under David Cameron introduced subsidies for renewables and for gas-fired power stations. The measures were supposed to be temporary, even before Cameron promised to cut ‘the green crap’, but renewables companies have opposed their removal, claiming that without ...”

“... him, however, and Watt was charged with high treason, along with an elderly goldsmith called David Downie, who was unfortunate enough to be at the meeting at which Watt disclosed his crackpot plan. The government was keen to persuade the jury and public opinion (though it was certainly not true) that the Edinburgh plot was part of a co-ordinated ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... with the scenes where the Romanian takes off and abandons the farmer heartrending as the idyllic French film never is quite. In the days when I might have written a television film like this it would never have been put on and even today, epic of sheep-farming though it is, I don’t see it forming one of the Saturday night film shows they have in our ...”

“... balance of instinct and culture or civilisation is not a Harlem matter; it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter very little understood.The democratic socialist Irving Howe, writing in the Nation, saw things differently. To him, Invisible Man was ‘a Negro novel’ and this was the source of its power: ‘It tells us how ...”