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“... D.M. Thomas’s shoddy translations of Pushkin and Akhmatova should have received more attention. Leopold Staff, who died in 1957, was one of the founding fathers of modern Polish literature and his sophisticated simplicity won the admiration of Milosz, Rozewicz and other leading poets. In Czerniawski’s translation of ‘Ars’ there is a Horatian ...”

“... In January​ 1904, King Leopold II of Belgium was invited to Berlin to attend a birthday dinner for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two monarchs were seated next to each other and everything was going nicely until the Kaiser suddenly brought up the question of a possible future French attack on Germany. In the event of a war between Germany and France, Wilhelm explained, he would expect the Belgians to side with Germany ...”

“... Arabs and then Europeans. Then the Europeans took it over, or, to be precise, one European, King Leopold II of the Belgians, who presented himself – the old monster – as a humanitarian, and was given the Congo as a personal fiefdom to prevent his more powerful neighbours squabbling over it. (There’s still a statue of him, incidentally, in the Jardin du ...”

“... French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga ...”

“... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...”

“... to what was expected to be a long, attritional war. Against this, however, there was no joint-staff organisation; a complicated command structure just about adequate for a static war; and a communications network barely adequate even in peace conditions. A French staff officer likened Gamelin’s headquarters to a ...”

“... labour back to central and East London’. In the Sixties and Seventies, about a third of all staff journalists on British national newspapers worked outside London. Now, less than a tenth do so. And those who work in London have to do about three times as much work. Roughly the same number of journalists work in London as in the Sixties. But there are ...”

“... Bonch-Bruevich, a major-general in the tsar’s service and head of the Red Army’s general staff, who outlived Stalin, is the outstanding example – few of the men and women who shaped the public affairs of the empire in 1914 held any power in 1924. Dominic Lieven’s new book, Towards the Flame, tries to make sense of the suicidal decision that ...”

“... niece and Siamese cat, which according to Peeters he sometimes took for walks on a lead. Leopold III surrendered on 27 May; placed under house arrest in his palace at Laeken, he tried to come to an arrangement with Hitler and refused to acknowledge the government in exile, all of which would cost him his position later on. Hergé took his cue from ...”

“... they got to the end of a lap. The young prince was a pupil, and always addressed as Sie by the staff, whereas the other boys were Du; he wasn’t allowed to wear gloves in the cold, though, hardiness being a Salem fetish. Hardiness and comradeship were promoted by ‘hikes’ and more ambitious expeditions, and those were fun – Mann took part in a ...”

“... against the Graf von Schwabing, the arch-German spy who, at a secret meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, successfully impersonates the First Sea Lord. Buchan’s fiction contains more offhand remarks about the Jews than it does Jewish characters. Cheyette lays great stress on an early story, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, in which a Jewish settler in a remote ...”

“... life was fitful. He held a research fellowship at the LSE, moved to Cambridge with the rest of its staff during the war, and was later briefly interned as an alien on the Isle of Man (C.P. Snow helped to get him released). After the war he taught extra-mural classes in London, then in 1954 joined the sociology department at Leicester. There, Elias remained ...”

“... had been a Hungarian Jew and Leo himself had been attacked by Lord Haw-Haw as ‘the half-Jew Leopold Amery’. At one stage Jack asserted that the victory of the German armies was ‘necessary in order that small children shall no longer be the victims of the Jews’. He also attempted to recruit British POWs to fight for the Nazis; this, not ...”

“... Charlotte was the beautiful and ambitious daughter of the most successful off-the-peg monarch, Leopold I of the Belgians, who had shown since 1831 how ersatz German royalty could offer a new and shaky state stability, dignity, neutrality and valuable connections. Maximilian was said to have moderately liberal inclinations. In reality, as Ridley neatly puts ...”

“... found the situation much improved. When the work ended, he decided not to return to the General Staff: he accepted an offer of early retirement and settled in Paris, where he studied, working on Universism, writing articles about the Russian Revolution and browsing in secondhand bookstores. Only now he was not alone. In Russia he had acquired not one but ...”