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“... republicanism’s loss of innocence in the face of the Terror. With the collapse of hopes in the French republic, English liberals like Browning and Clough – one might add Landor, who deserved inclusion here – looked increasingly to the Italian cause. One of Paulin’s main aims is ‘to redeem Clough from the neglect which his work has suffered’, and ...”

“... traces in the social edifice. This gap – which recalls the interval between 1789 and 1793 in the French Revolution – is the space of Lenin’s unique intervention. The fundamental lesson of revolutionary materialism is that revolution must strike twice. It is not that the first moment has the form of a revolution, with the substance having to be filled in ...”

“... had an occupant. A small, gaunt, elderly man in a jacket and open-necked shirt stood in the French window. I think I remember a look of something like panic on his face as the gaggle of 19-year-olds approached. After a brief hesitation he turned and exited rapidly through the glass doors into the garden. I watched as he walked away from the ...”

“... allegedly less addictive. Amphetamine was first brought to market in the US by Smith, Kline and French in 1934 in the form of a bronchial inhaler, Benzedrine, but its stimulant properties were soon recognised and it was made available in tablet form as a remedy for narcolepsy and a tonic against depression. As with cocaine, one of its first applications was ...”

“... old and the nasty new. So what we get from Derrida and Foucault, and from other contemporary French writers, is not so much attempts to unmask the realities of the time as warnings to eschew ‘totalisation’ – to avoid the ‘metaphysical’ impulse to place everything within one great big ‘privileged’ ahistorical context. From this point of ...”

“... it here because it allows me to introduce an extraordinary page taken from the report that the French Jesuit Paul de Brebeuf sent in 1636 to the provincial priest of the Company on the events that took place in the Québec mission during that year. One of the priests had explained to the natives (naturally the account refers to them as sauvages) that the ...”

“... witnessed the birth and growth of sociology, the discipline most preoccupied with ‘modernity’. Karl Marx produced his mature scientific writings between the late 1860s and his death in 1883, while the other two giants of the sociological canon, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, wrote their most important works between 1890 and 1920. As Bhambra and Holmwood ...”

“... still see the mid-1970s Penguin collection I carried around like a talisman: parallel English and French texts, the cover Carlos Schwabe’s painting Spleen et Idéal. OK, I confess: I fell hard for the Baudelaire mythos, while never quite getting the poetry. I remember being put off by all the ‘O, muse!’ stuff, which seemed more redolent of attic tallow ...”

“... told off in oracular fashion for picking the wrong subject for a fiction. She writes a story in French, and he finds out, then proceeds to congratulate her ‘on the way in which you’ve picked up every old worn-out literary phrase that’s been lying about the streets of Paris for the last twenty years, and managed to pack them all into those few ...”

“... President Giscard d’Estaing with a dog (including teaching it to obey simple commands in French), and much about the comings and goings of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Prince Charles and the like – plenty of material here for a comparative study of the discourteous and the bibulous, with suggestions of an inverse correlation ...”

“... a number of young physicists to enter the rapidly-burgeoning field of molecular biology. The French geneticist and Nobel laureate François Jacob recalled: After the war, many young physicists were disgusted by the military use that had been made of atomic energy ... Some looked to biology with a mixture of diffidence and hope ... To hear one of the ...”

“... Nietzsche he pretended to quote, who as Reich Chancellor read and reread the adventure stories of Karl May which had occupied his boyhood, who locked himself into his nightly showings of Hollywood films while Germany burned. The would-be creator and composer of Zukunftsmusik, Wagnerian music of the future, was a travesty of the romantic artist, an aesthetic ...”

“... from a metaphysic to a particular political consequence (much as people used to worry about Karl Popper’s deduction of a piecemeal liberalism from his metaphysic of provisional knowledge). The trouble with metaphysical theories is that they are utterly general, and so designed in advance to accommodate my particular cultural adaptation. Norris grants ...”

“... a Fred Karno’s army, untrained, largely unarmed, and kitted out in the horizon-blue uniforms the French had mothballed twenty years earlier. Three weeks after he joined it, Stefan’s division was chaotically dissolved with an every-man-for-himself order. He spent the next two years as itinerantly as he had spent the previous war: in hiding, on the road, in ...”

“... Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow’s Children ‘a compelling and satisfying book’. All those endorsements, however, didn’t keep her novels from going out of print at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then ...”