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“... he was not present. Even discounting the fact that all the accounts we have of his life, including Denis Mack Smith’s authoritative 1994 volume, tend to hagiography, it’s clear that from the earliest age Mazzini was both physically attractive and immensely charismatic. Briefly united under Napoleon, Italy was returned in 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, to ...”

“... historians. No one would ever suggest that Raymond Carr thought like a Madrid teddy-boy or that Denis Mack Smith wrote like un ragazzo di borgata. A ‘sense of place’ is perhaps a commoner attribute, although Cobb’s descriptions of places, often in sentences of about 250 words, are unlike other people’s and immediately recognisable. He once described ...”

“... but hutment dwellers could not be oblivious to the hostilities. The former Labour chancellor Denis Healey, who spent the first five years of his life there, remembered a Zeppelin coming down on Blackheath ‘like a great meteor’. There were other dangers too. The tar roofs would melt in summer, sometimes setting the huts alight, and one woman recalled ...”

“... Udine crosses a plateau of vineyards and terracotta-roofed farms backed by an indistinct range of hills. After an hour or so it stops at Mestre, allowing a glimpse of Venice across the lagoon, then retreats into the campagna. As we headed north, the hills bulked larger and darker. We got off the train at Conegliano, just ...”

“... of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped ...”

“... successful, highly competitive, remarkably assiduous professional politician. To use a phrase of Denis Healey’s, he is, of course, a politician with a hinterland – wine, food, family, friends, talk, travel, croquet, books. Sometimes, the hinterland has loomed so large that the city it serves seems almost to have disappeared from sight. Everyone knows ...”

“... Time. After all, Blake was the only English poet noted in the Elegies, among Hölderlin, Goethe, Denis Saurat, Sorley MacLean, Dante and Ossian. Blake had written, ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau’; Henderson: Fuck on, fuck on, Verlaine, Rimbaud You blissful buggers; fuck again – For on my heart as on the town The small drops of your poems ...”

“... 1945, the mind drifts off time and again to the sacred grove of Diana at Lake Nemi in the Alban hills. In antiquity this idyllic setting was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a ...”

“... there. Ten days later, he described the Wicklow mountains: I walk immeasurably & unrestrainedly, hills and dales, all day, and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my Montparnasse belt through the Homer dusk. Often very moving and it helps to swamp the usual palpitations. But I disagree with you about the gardenish landscape. The ...”

“... officials (one of them the party’s chief administrator at Stormont, the former IRA prisoner Denis Donaldson) had been arrested for allegedly stealing and copying hundreds of official documents ‘useful to terrorists in carrying out acts of violence’. The incident had made the Assembly unworkable, and on 14 October it was suspended, for the fourth ...”