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“... dream of clarity (say) is itself an ideological dream, an issue confronted with notable honesty by Philip Thody in his book on Barthes, now reissued with an afterword. Having struggled throughout the earlier edition to translate Barthes into an English critical idiom, helped by much good will and intelligence, hampered by a bewildered sense of how much he was ...”

“... the war, the publication in Wheels of Wilfred Owen’s poems, the 1919 Exhibition of Modern French Art. Their snooty irreverence had made postwar England feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the ...”

“... on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk ...”

“... called Catherine Beijdedvellen. Behar Senior then became a British citizen, having served in the French Foreign Legion and the British Army. On his death in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances. The change of name from Behar to Blake was understandable ...”

“... Coketown seems an odd way of going forward, however, even if it were possible. The actors on the French revolutionary stage of 1848, Tocqueville observed, were putting on the costumes and replaying the political parts of 1789, while the real social revolution emerged unseen by them. The past can only tell us about the future that does not happen, and ...”

“... never commanded so much as a battalion in the field. He was selected partly because he could speak French, just as his French opposite Saint-Arnaud had been chosen by Napoleon III because he had fluent English. Unfortunately, Saint-Arnaud also had terminal cancer, which was to bring his colourful life to an end shortly after ...”

“... civil religion. O’Brien’s Jefferson presides as high priest of a reified ‘Cult of the French Revolution’. This approach turns out to be timely. O’Brien records that when Timothy McVeigh was arrested on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, he wore a T-shirt bearing the words of Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to ...”

“... an extract from Wesker’s The Kitchen. Less emblematic but equally germane is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are ...”

“... They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”

“... think that of most others in this branch of the profession. I come across, say, a letter from a French Ambassador in London in April 1583, where he remarks that there is about to occur a ‘great conjunction’ of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aries, something that happens once every seven hundred and sixty years or so and heralds some frightful ...”

“... to put you in the presence of a person, not a picture. It was probably Gainsborough’s friend Philip Thicknesse who wrote that his ‘pictures may not be said so properly to be like the originals as to be the people themselves’, and similar remarks were made about La Tour’s pastels. The critical language would be equally appropriate for a piece of ...”

“... often taken parodic form (the soup cans of Andy Warhol, the deliberate kitsch of architects like Philip Venturi, author of the feisty manifesto Learning from Las Vegas) is now itself parodied in Gilbert Adair’s funny and accomplished second novel. The narrator of Love and Death on Long Island is the Hampstead-inhabiting author of four novels more popular ...”

“... go through that again.’ In his Passchendaele, which marks the 70th anniversary of that occasion, Philip Warner argues that the worst feature of the battle was that it so ‘disheartened the democracies’ that they ‘became less willing to preserve peace by preparing for war’. Yet in the military context of the day the attempt to enlarge the Ypres Salient ...”

“... Wars. His first four novels, which explored and extended the bounds of sci-fi, owe a large debt to Philip K. Dick. Lethem even sold the author’s estate ‘a few dozen’ paperback copies of out-of-print titles they didn’t have, so that the executor could seek their republication. ‘Vulcan’s Hammer, in other words, is sort of my fault,’ Lethem once ...”