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“... censors and the press. In Britain an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best ...”

“... Debray seems to suggest, is that he never lost sight of these older barbarisms in the way the Paris intelligentsia did. For all this, Debray still can’t work out how he failed to grasp at the time what a colossus de Gaulle was. After all, Debray isn’t short of intelligence himself and his intellect was on brilliant display to quite other purposes ...”

“... Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom’. Carmen bin Ladin, the ex-wife of Osama’s brother Yeslam, and Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s widow, have published memoirs to respectful ...”

“... to think obsolete. He would not use broken tombstones to mend a wall. While Down and Out in Paris and London was in the press he was taking an active part in Anglican services and reading the Church Times. He asked to be buried in consecrated ground and in accordance with the rites of the Church of England. Such a man would not have agreed with ...”

“... reading of politics is one of the running themes of his letters from the 1950s to the art critic Bernard Berenson, which have been edited with unobtrusive wit and erudition by Richard Davenport-Hines.* During the Suez crisis of 1956 Trevor-Roper concluded that ‘there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class ...”

“... pricing schemes and shielded trusts which operates in the Square Mile, Geneva, Washington, Paris, the Cayman Islands and other ‘Dracula zones’. This deterministic view sits uneasily alongside the evidence, presented later in the book, that seems to suggest it is a mistake to exonerate greedy businessmen and politicians, whether they are Western or ...”

“... grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson – in Hughes’s mocking words, ‘the disinterested, Goethean sage of I Tatti’ – who charged his employer 25 per cent on the sale of any work he had authenticated. Today there are art advisers at the shoulder of new money; the deference ...”

“... the Netherlands, George Clifford, a director of the Dutch East India Company and plant fancier; in Paris, the brothers and naturalists Antoine and Bernard de Jussieu. In his journals and letters, he often referred to himself in the third person as ‘the archiater’ (royal physician), an honorary title granted him in 1747 ...”

“... out and made his way quickly to the railway station. Gide, who was 25, had met Wilde before in Paris and Florence. He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of what he said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The first account, written the following day, was to his mother. He explained to her that he had, after much consideration, decided to ...”

“... was planning to live an exotic life in some distant, turbulent place as soon as I could, Paris maybe, attending the Sorbonne, or Cairo, where, rumour had it, if you sat in a certain café eventually everyone in the world would pass by. Maybe not people from Brooklyn, but everyone else.’ Audrey’s exposure to the climate of experience is ...”

“... new offices. This ramshackle edifice came close to collapse in 1709, when the crown banker Samuel Bernard found himself seriously embarrassed for cash. By the end of the war the crown owed 900 million livres in promissory notes. The death of Louis XIV brought a fresh crisis. Noailles toyed with, but in the end dismissed, the idea of summoning the Estates ...”

“... wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to Livingston’s book, saying that if only he had been able to read it before starting his own book, he’d have gone about it differently.) What Livingston calls the ...”

“... there were some uncommonly righteous lasses too. Together they had seen the vision splendid. Let Bernard Shaw, running on rich mixture, explain: Joyousness, a sacred gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity, rises like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust and mud of the slums; rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs rise ...”

“... the terrorist threat or unwilling to follow France into its former colonies.In search of support, Paris urged its partners in the region to build a ‘security and development alliance’. The G5-Sahel staged its first military joint operation – 750 West African soldiers assisted by 180 French military – in 2017. A year later they were unable to defend ...”

“... but fails to say convincingly what it was, on the inside as it were, that drove Debray from Paris to Havana to become the man that Fidel and his associates referred to as ‘Danton’; the trusted emissary sent to link up with Che in 1967 during his disastrous escapade in Bolivia; the jailbird who sat out his late twenties in a tattered shirt with a ...”