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“... and whimsical at the same time.’ Patrick is the damaged, scornful victim of his father, David Melrose, ‘descended from Charles II through a prostitute’. Centuries of damp arrest have created the monstrous David: ‘The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing-room ...”

“... and organisations; and he draws illuminating contemporary comparisons with the United States, France, Germany and Australia. He has tackled mainstream political and economic history, and tried his hand at biography; he is highly sensitive to art and architecture, poetry and literature, culture and ideology; and he has been a much-emulated pioneer in ...”

“... took over from more ceremonial forms of greeting around 1800: in Britain first, then in Holland, France and Russia. In his Memoirs, written in the 1790s, Casanova describes a ‘shake-hand amical’ bestowed on one of his London acquaintances. Madame Bovary provides evidence that the handshake was still regarded, in ...”

“... if it hadn’t been for the way Zidane ended the last game of his career in July. Captaining France in the final of the World Cup, he was sent off for violent conduct: in what must immediately have become one of the most widely seen sporting images of all time, he drives his head – forcefully and, it must be said, with considerable grace – into Marco ...”

“... en route from Livorno to England, was captured by two French warships off the Spanish coast. France having joined the War of Independence on the side of the Americans, the Westmorland’s captain, Willis Machell, was prepared for trouble. He had a crew of sixty and 22 cannons, but was outgunned. The ship was towed into Málaga and declared a legal trophy ...”

“... are to imagine he will never stop thinking of her, alive or dead, but Scott and his screenwriter, David Scarpa, seem to have gone to sleep for this part of the story, leaving the film to invent its own language and emotions according to whatever clichés it can find. Things get worse when the film takes up the tale of Napoleon’s need for an heir and ...”

“... cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his title in the university catalogue from ‘professor’ to ‘swami’; teach ‘The Wisdom of the East’ instead of ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner’; and replace the furniture in his office with a simple ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... but close to the shore in Filey Bay.In 1779 the War of Independence was in its fifth year. France, keen to exact revenge on Britain for the Seven Years’ War, had signed a treaty with the Thirteen Colonies, effectively declaring war on its old enemy. Spain, too, declared war on Britain, and hatched a plan with ...”

“... to prevail in this country.’ When it did, both brothers became exiles, Heinrich in the South of France, Thomas in Zürich, where he could remain within the ‘sphere of German culture’. Heinrich immediately became a leader of the anti-Nazi émigré writers; Thomas did not publicly denounce the regime until 1936. After that open break, however, it was he ...”

“... civilisation.’ The problem with this statement, and with Craveri’s book, is not so much that France’s privileged order depended for its existence on a vast structure of misery and exploitation, although of course it did, but that Craveri takes idealised, flattering descriptions of noble life, and rules for how to behave in salons, as accurate accounts ...”

“... registers and ordinances to personal travel accounts from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and France. Groebner begins with a trick played on a 15th-century Florentine woodworker: his friends, among them a city official with a record book and a priest, insisted so strongly that he was someone else that he finally agreed, only for his friends to return him ...”

“... an older man; André is the older man, an architect living in fear of losing his romantic prize. David is dying of cancer; Sophia is protecting a dead frog that has come back to life. Joanna is a corporate lawyer who has taken on an unscrupulous client to raise money for her ailing sister; Slimboy is a Nigerian YouTube star, fearful of his country’s ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”