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“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... executives and club shareholders. According to Dominique Spinosi, the security chief of the French World Cup Committee, ‘the British invented the poison of hooliganism at the start, but they have also invented the antidote.’ The cure is rigid ticket arrangements, a sensible separation of fans and a legal squeeze against touts: but by allocating 60 ...”

“... the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French. Within two decades, the Conquest had been commemorated by two astonishing historical artefacts. The Bayeux Tapestry (pre-1082) must be the only artistic masterpiece that is also a crucial source for a major historical event. Domesday Book (1086) provides ...”

“... are a fiercely bellicose nation [who] have overturned the ancient military glory of the French by victories so numerous’ that they had flattened the kingdom of France. What had happened to make the English such an effective force in the decades since their humiliating defeat at Bannockburn in 1314? The short answer is the Battle of Crécy in ...”

“... they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that London feared French ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean, Nicholas hoped for an understanding with the British. Returning to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed ...”

“... you have actually seen: Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the Resistance, for instance, or David Lean’s Bridge on the River Seine, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Shadows of the Army. The film opens with a homage to Leone, Morricone-style music (by Morricone, as it happens) on the soundtrack, and the words ‘Once upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied ...”

“... in responding to the challenge. Writing in the last issue of this review, the American philosopher David Hoy gives courteous attention to Hartman’s redemptive strategy. But he remains sceptical about Derrida’s influence and, in the last resort, dismissive of his claims. For him, Derrida practises a ‘recognisable genre’, that of bringing philosophy to ...”

“... is better informed about the fake soldier, ‘Sergeant Farthing’, claiming that his real name is David Jones and that he is a Welshman loosely attached to the London theatre. As for ‘Mr Bartholomew’, the actor says he believes him to be something of a philosopher, with a dissident and free-thinking bias, a certain mathematical or numerological expertise ...”

“... monuments of geological time that extended far beyond the records of ancient civilisations. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, thought that the Earth had been formed from the debris of a comet that had collided with the sun. He heated iron balls in the forge of his estate in Burgundy and, based on how quickly they cooled ...”

“... The idea of a co-ordinated attack by five Arab armies – Goliath and his hordes against little David – is fatuous. When Israel attacked Egyptian forces in September 1948, Abdullah hoped the Egyptians would lose: he believed that an Israeli victory would prevent the Arabs from challenging his right to the West Bank. In the weeks preceding the ...”

“... doorstopper – the ‘encyclopedic’ novel – which includes such celebrated behemoths as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Although mustering a meagre 482 pages to their 1079 and 827, The Last Samurai is vauntingly expansive in both form and ambition. As a subgenre, the encyclopedic novel develops ...”

“... unclear, but the convention was well established in Europe by the Middle Ages. ‘Grimoire’ is French for ‘grammary’, a book of grammar: it may have been adopted because the manuscripts were often in Latin; perhaps it was a term used more generally of abstruse, esoteric texts. Certainly, grimoires had been around for many hundreds of years before they ...”

“... in October 1945; Philippe Henriot, minister of propaganda for the Vichy government, shot by the French Resistance in June 1944. There was a place in Pound’s poem, it seems, for more or less any minor Axis celebrity who came to grief. And he was through with being nice to Churchill, that ‘sputtering tank of nicotine and/stale whiskey’. At the same ...”

“... of rescue, and pansexual before that term was in use. (He sometimes slept with his friend, the French actor Christian Marquand.) Mann uses that New School punch-up to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect ...”