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“... Philip Larkin gave the name High Windows to what proved to be his last collection of verse (published in 1974, 11 years before he died). The phrase had been used as the title of one of the poems included, and also occurs at the poem’s end: the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless ...”

“... by one of those common but always surprising coincidences, was another famous painter-to-be, Philip Guston. It was a reactionary time and place, with red-baiting, strike-breaking and an active Klan. Both Guston and Pollock ran foul of the authorities. Pollock had already started to drink seriously. He dropped in and out of school. He was attracted to ...”

“... AT–T Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT–T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by affinities with the ...”

“... on how many whites lived there – that is, whether there were enough to keep the blacks down.) Philip Murphy, the excellent editor of these fascinating volumes of (mainly) official documents, confesses himself at a loss to explain why Nyasaland in particular was ever included, unless it was simply to justify the title of ‘federation’, for which three ...”

“... Spanish monarchs of the 16th century, to Charles V, who governed most of Europe, and his son Philip II, who sent the Armada against England and built the Escorial to house his bones. He had delusions, too, about the catastrophic state of the Spanish economy during the Second World War and its aftermath. Believing in the Falangist policy of autarky ...”

“... in the 1790s; The Police and the People (1970), his first monograph in English, concerned French popular protest in the decades after the Revolution; Reactions to the French Revolution (1972) ranged beyond the metropole to the records of the départements for individual perspectives on the Revolution ‘from ground ...”

“... work. A reluctant messenger for Louis IX, later St Louis, William carried a letter from the French monarch to Kublai’s predecessor, Möngke Khan, at his capital of Caracorum. Initially planning only to minister to Christian captives on the western edge of the Mongol empire, the luckless friar found himself ‘rerouted roughly two thousand miles ...”

“... that is, invented.’ Gallagher’s next move is to look at some wonderful 19th-century French counter-fictions with titles like Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836), Uchronie (1857) and Éternité par les astres (1872). The title of the first is self-explanatory – the book, by Louis Geoffroy-Château, is about what didn’t happen after ...”

“... Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are Mozart and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The name of Neville Chamberlain seems to set off a nervous chain-reaction of theatricality, for he is noisily succeeded by Gower Champion, Coco Chanel, Carol ...”

“... unfamiliar, in language or habit. In his various book-lined studies there is no sign that great French or Russian literature sat alongside his editions of Hardy, Waugh and his favourite 19th-century Uranian poets. He hated abroad on principle, with the exception of Australia, which he visited in 1961 and celebrated for its wonderful light, architectural ...”

“... was time to internationalise himself. He learned enough Danish, Latin, English, Russian, German, French and Italian to read or get by in, and in most cases rather more. By turns, he put himself through Brandes and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky and Strindberg; Tagore; Bourget and Proust; Freud, Jung and Adler; Joyce and Hemingway. ‘If there was one 20th-century ...”

“... At the Paris Salon​ of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are sketching from a ringleted, clothed female model, concentrating on getting the folds of the drapery right ...”

“... him to Uganda when he was four. At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding the French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he’d just returned to his hotel near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée when the French police called him in for interrogation. They were inquiring into a ...”

“... the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such ...”

“... in this country’ – Germany – ‘will be accomplished much more quickly than in France. The French just sit around in realms of self-pity, telling one atrocity story after another.’ The Germans he stayed with ‘have done their best to impress us with the idea that they were never Nazis … These houses are frequently full of Nazi propaganda, most ...”