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“... dark days of 1917, there was general agreement that France must be defended. Was the cement that held the French together the union sacrée or the intellectual, spiritual and political leadership they were given? Some historians take the view that the stoicism of soldiers who concealed the realities of modern warfare from their friends and family insulated ...”

“... These are examples of what Gowing calls ‘the politics of touch’. In all of this women were held responsible for what had been done to them by men – in Holland, Pierre Bayle attacked this hypocrisy, and followed his own logic through to the point of defending abortion and infanticide. No 17th-century English man or woman seems to have had a comparable ...”

“... through every twist and turn of his chaotic presidency. On the Sunday before the election, he held rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida – a jet-fuelled version of the whistle-stop tour by which Harry Truman in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The ...”

“... Is there a British Marxism? David McLellan’s new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists ...”

“... his medical records were hacked, police officers were bribed for access to the details they held on him. The Sun in particular, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, made repeated intrusions into his private life in order to get him on the back foot. Brown calls it ‘a direct attempt to distort and suborn the policy of the government’. He accepts ...”

“... other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by ...”

“... in Parliament it has triumphed over the odds, largely thanks to bloody-minded commando raids by David Owen, who has been the one politician consistently able to score off Thatcher. In the opinion polls it has been back at the levels of the General Election campaign. Moreover, whenever there has been a real election, the Alliance has beaten the polls in a ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... painting published in 1992 revealed that although traces of the Cupid survived, he can never have held a bird. This should have been obvious all along: the picture has been in Dresden since 1699, and had the bird been visible while the Cupid was intact, someone in the 18th century would surely have identified the Venus as the one by Giorgione described by ...”

“... A rhetorical distance establishes and holds the distance between cultures; the writer himself is held by that distance. A year later Kipling investigated the milk supply of Lahore, thought to be a source of typhoid. He took his purposes and standards with him. His report imitated the narratives of the English sanitary reformers who had written about the ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in ...”

“... Dickensian asylum, or a ‘snake pit’. For that period, it was a decent place. Still, Elsie was held against her will and without anyone asking whether she should have been there.Archie was quite good at school but had no taste for it, and no need once his mother was gone. He preferred picture shows and music hall at the Bristol Hippodrome. So he went ...”

“... electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus presented by the SNP. Surely, David Cameron reckoned, the same formula would work again a mere two years later in the UK-wide Brexit referendum. After all, there was also the reassuring story of the UK’s first Euro-referendum in 1975. Then, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had gone ...”

“... to me was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get an interview with any of the guys from GQ. David Gandy, the male supermodel, wearing a shark-tooth suit and a Burberry tie, was being interviewed for Fashion TV. Within seconds of him standing up people were photographing him being filmed. You see this all the time at fashion events. Legend says there was ...”

“... for the CIA both in Latin America and in Africa. Luis Posada is an explosives expert who formerly held a commission in the US Army. Like Rodriguez, he participated in many anti-Castro operations in the Sixties. In the early Seventies, he served as a counter-insurgency adviser to the Venezuelan Army, and, later, as chief of operations of the Venezuelan ...”