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“... the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit for discoveries, how can historians hope to do better, let alone ...”

“... on both sides of the Atlantic. These were not just any old fleeting celebrities: they included Charles Laughton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ira Gershwin, e.e. cummings and Lord Mountbatten. He became conspicuously friendly with the Duke of Edinburgh. Science was not then, and has never been, a celebrity preoccupation, but war tends to move science rapidly up ...”

“... for the intimacy between language and power germinated in France during the last decade of de Gaulle, and took root in the United States during the Reagan years. For the twin properties of language that seemed to be self-evident were precisely those with which many left-leaning academics were preoccupied – authoritarian power and the resistance ...”

“... present-day Gabon to discuss the dreams of Jacques Foccart, ‘a master manipulator’ employed by De Gaulle and known as ‘the White Sorcerer’. De Gaulle set up Elf Aquitaine in order to try and crack the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon oil companies and Elf Gabon, one of its subsidiaries, proved crucial. Foccart ...”

“... of the ERM some six years ago. (Britain has had a persistent trade deficit despite its massive de facto devaluation in 1992.) Nor has France suffered from the impact of globalisation and international capital mobility as many predicted it would. When, in the early Nineties, Hoover decided to move its headquarters from France, citing high social security ...”

“... projects, this excessively long biography offers both ugly revelations and moving insights. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... in an implausible number of car accidents with a string of different men; first with the singer Charles Aznavour in July 1951; then again with Aznavour a month later – this time her lover, the cyclist André Pousse, was also in the car. In 1958, she had two accidents on the same stretch of road with another lover, Georges Moustaki, an Egyptian-French ...”

“... non-violent Nationalist Arthur Griffith but from 1917 led by the senior survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera – this new radical movement won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster in the December 1918 General Election. Assembling in Dublin on 19 January 1919, those elected members not in prison or ‘on the run’ met as Dáil Éireann – the Parliament ...”

“... Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for the Resistance under cover of his work in the textile trade. After crossing into Spain through the Pyrenees, he had presented himself ...”

“... Wilson fulminated against the BBC, he contented himself with rather petty gestures – like making Charles Hill its chairman, or giving ITN a key interview and refusing the BBC one – rather than taking more substantive measures to punish the Corporation or bring it to heel. Edward Heath, in contrast, was an image-maker’s nightmare, for he despised the ...”

“... are a long time coming, and when they come, they’re full. For sceptics like Farage, the Palais de l’Europe is a damningly appropriate metaphor for the European project as a whole. The architectural arrangements in the Parliament building in Brussels are more satisfactory. The Parliament spends only one week in every month at the Strasbourg ...”

“... Apaches, as Luc Sante explains in The Other Paris, were propelled to fame by imaginative fin-de-siècle journalists and pamphleteers who felt the city was at risk from ‘an army of crime’. The cause of the arrests, and the sudden celebrity of the apaches, was the discovery of a corpse near Père Lachaise, armed to its rotting teeth with ...”

“... felt strong enough to veto British entry. However you look at it, Young’s verdict runs, ‘de Gaulle without doubt treated Macmillan monstrously.’ That is true, and de Gaulle was repeating the British mistake of greatly overestimating his country’s power. All the same, some of his fears about Britain in ...”

“... Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers ...”