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“... literature.’ Taking an ‘optimistic and Marxist view’, he found contributions from France, Spain, Russia and Poland, and New Writing seemed, in its beginnings, the authentic voice of violence and resistance. The voice was to change and grow considerably more mellow with changing times, with Lehmann, as Wright very aptly says, ‘bringing ...”

“... Mme Simone Veil, the Parliament’s President, smartly declared both budgets approved. Belgium, France and Germany then threatened not to pay; and the Commission started legal proceedings against them. They may end up in the dock at the European Court. Future historians of Europe may see the whole story as a constitutional struggle, like royal feuds with ...”

“... knew she couldn’t help herself, and that hope, not calculation, lay behind each new throw. C. David Heymann did manage to interview his subject, and he draws heavily on her notebooks and on the findings of an army of researchers. Poor Little Rich Girl is dense with facts, figures and, above all, names, and is marred by a clumsily novelettish ...”

“... CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude bathing, and his belief that if David Owen had stayed in the Labour Party he would have become its leader. All his columns were eagerly followed, but one series excited particular attention. He reported that his wife, the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, was in hospital, and chronicled the ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... launched a fleet of biographies, editions and collections of his letters over the last century. David Brown’s fine Life is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations: his inconsistent ego, his contradictions, his Waspy waspishness. It deals with his reserve and self-consciousness, his reluctance to risk failure, his unconvincing ...”

“... square kilometres of forest worldwide – an area greater than the combined size of the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Ireland and the Czech Republic.’ The result is that something like 135 rainforest species are being driven to extinction every day. Meanwhile, cities and suburbs ...”

“... was based in Belgium. Some countries were more resistant: by then I was being flown over to France to DJ in clubs in Paris and Lyon, but, despite my best endeavours, the French seemed largely unreceptive. Two or three years later, they finally caught on. The young man who had lost ten thousand francs organising the first (lacklustre) rave in Lyon ...”

“... Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and are covered with the handwritten revisions and instructions with which Constable besieged Lucas: ‘two ...”

“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”

“... parts of it could be gifted to the US military. The Chagos were claimed in the 18th century by France as part of its Île de Maurice dependency. Coconut plantations were established and enslaved men and women imported from Madagascar and south-eastern Africa to produce copra. After the British conquered the archipelago in 1810 they brought in both ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... his people’s identity. It was a bestseller in Israel and won the Prix Aujourd’hui in France. Eric Hobsbawm called it a ‘much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth’. Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, aims to trace the concept of a Jewish homeland from the vague territorial references of the ...”

“... to support you. You must talk with burning eloquence about something big. Demand Calais back from France, say. Next you set fire to the House of Commons and blame it on the Tory Party. ‘These traitors,’ you say, ‘have ruined the country with their Montagu-Normanism.’ You run them all in without trial. Hooray! Press magnates go behind the wire at an ...”

“... baronage. Smith should not be aligned too closely with critics of the Ancien Régime. Like David Hume, he admired the way modern European monarchies, such as France, protected personal freedoms. When outlining the complex patchwork of taxes which ‘oppressed’ the subjects of the French monarchy, he felt compelled ...”