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“... threat: in the west the Greeks, in the east the Armenians, and in the south the victorious Allies, France and Britain. They had responded to Mustafa Kemal’s appeal, addressed to ‘fine people, with honour and respect, Turks and Kurds ... brothers around the institution of the Caliphate’. No sooner had the war been won, however, than the basis of Muslim ...”

“... the bid without recourse to questionable, not to say illegal, means. We know that since at least France 1998, bribes, presents and favours have been handed out by every successful World Cup host. The Sunday Times investigation into the bid concluded that Qatar is no different. As for alcohol, weak beer from one of Fifa’s sponsors will be available around ...”

“... feminine nom de plume to avoid military censorship, and that he lives ‘in exile’ in southern France. The impression given is that Khadra is a dissident, rather than a staunch defender of the Algerian army, an institution that bears considerable responsibility for the country’s descent into war. Khadra is a talented writer, but he isn’t a ...”

“... ubiquitous in Italian writing on the topic and can also be found in medieval texts from England, France, the Iberian peninsula and, slightly later, from Germany. Stories provide instruction for those without access to texts, as Gregory had explained, and images are to be venerated but not worshipped, because that would be idolatry. This was the position ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... loudspeakers on the underside of the aircraft, through which might emerge’, according to David Pascoe, ‘passages from Memories of Lenin, interspersed with exhortations about the Five-Year Plan’. Eighty red lights on the fuselage allowed it to flash slogans to the remotest regions as it swooped across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner ...”

“... look like the latest novel from Gallimard) is a sequence of ten short stories about the British in France; and given this theme, they turn, of necessity, on interpretation, often in the most down-to-earth sense of the word. ‘Experiment’ relates how the narrator’s Uncle Freddy got involved with the French Surrealists. It was a favourite story of his and ...”

“... Barrett, who died of cancer in 1961 – Barrett was nearly 16. (There was Roger Waters, too, and David Gilmour – who’d replace Barrett within moments, almost, of the band’s success. Both were Cambridge boys. Both, Willis tells us, had messed around with paint pots in a late-toddler phase in the same Saturday morning art club as Barrett at Homerton ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... business,’ observed his diametrical opposite, Lloyd George. Volume One of the new biography by David Dilks uses the voluminous Chamberlain diaries and letters drawn upon by Feiling, but supplements them with a mass of public and private archives not available in 1944. It elaborates in a quarter of a million words themes dealt with by Feiling in fifty ...”

“... the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced. David Riches is aware of this incongruity. His symposium contains 11 papers by 11 different authors drawn from the Proceedings of an ESRC-funded conference held at St Andrews University in January 1985. The violence under discussion is not a concept which readily ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”

“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”

“... most of his war booty to Magdalen College. With Braudel on ‘The Rejection of the Reformation in France’ we are getting on. As a parting thought, Braudel throws in the suggestion that the Reformation halted wherever it ran into the bounds of the ancient Roman Empire: ‘The frontiers of Catholicism were the Rhine and the Danube.’ Surely Britain was part ...”