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“... with no binding ties to France (‘we have one prime and essential need: our dignity’). De Gaulle warned Guineans that a strike of this kind against French influence would be a Pyrrhic victory and when Sékou Touré’s cause prevailed, France was as good as its word. On the eve of independence, as an estimated three thousand French nationals ...”

“... at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved to learn that for our London debut the director has elbowed the ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... change, resource depletion, the future of the planet and so on, which is more or less exactly what Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer hoped would happen when they first proposed it in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000. Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist; Stoermer, who died in 2012, was a freshwater ecologist. The nature of their work caused them to ...”

“... from the biblical curse of Noah to the quasi-scientific concept of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) which prevailed in the Spanish Empire. The question of how, exactly, these intellectual influences shaped social and political action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book ...”

“... to Graham’s son, whose Intimate Lies is an account of her relationship with Fitzgerald, the old man was shocked: ‘He had believed quite simply that F. Scott Fitzgerald must surely have died years ago along with his era.’In late November 1940 Fitzgerald had a heart attack at a drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. Afterwards, confined to bed, he tried to ...”

“... to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially with Elliot Paul), and Jolas, too, was at the heart of art movements about which at the time the outside world knew little – Surrealism, Dadaism and Joyce among them. Few small mags have done as much to ‘make art free’. As well as Stein’s ‘Elucidation’, the first ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than himself.’I picked up. ‘Are you safe?’ my 20-year-old said.‘There’s none of us safe in the world.’‘No, I’m serious. Trump’s been shot or something.’I got up CNN on my ...”

“... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking ...”

“... yet languid accent of the Eton and Christ Church of his day, Eden could well have seemed more a man of fashion than a politician of the first rank. St James’s Street rather than Westminster or Whitehall might have been expected to be his habitat. Yet the most cursory glance at his career dispels the illusion. Unless one is very tough and very ...”

“... from ‘barren Caledonian lands’. At the King’s Theatre, Gluck laid on an opera (La caduta de’ giganti or The Fall of the Giants) which was an allegory of the crisis. Catholic chapels burned all over England, and visiting Scots sought in terror to conceal their accent.At first, the rising had seemed almost trivial. In August 1745, Duncan ...”

“... in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative ...”

“... their children. Yet justice demands that everyone be treated equally; such slogans as ‘I am a man’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ express this basic egalitarianism. The problem and the pain of love is that, for all of us, some people matter infinitely more than others.Any reckoning with the affective qualities of justice must also weigh the importance of ...”