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“... From 1940 onwards Camus was effectively ‘exiled’ from Algeria, having left for metropolitan France and become cut off from North Africa by the war. (Henceforth, apart from occasional visits, Algeria would remain a distant prospect, on which he gazed with ever greater dismay.) By 1943 he was living in Paris and working for Gallimard. In the last five ...”

“... of Saint-Just. The two editors of the volume concentrate on the peasantry in the South of France. Although national politics could intrude on the village, usually as a result of the activities of royalist agents, the Revolution tended to be seen mainly in local terms. Those who had profited from it in ways that offended traditional ideas about what ...”

“... kindly paterfamilias with twinkling eyes – disintegrated; his friends were appalled. Slater and Peter Ackroyd, looking at the same letters and bills of fare, the same reminiscences of children and admirers, aren’t convinced Dickens ever slept with Nelly Ternan, but Tomalin’s Dickens is so virile (those ten children): of course he did. We know little ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... have to be particularly hideous. It is impossible to give a full list, but among those chosen were Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Alan Ross, Kenneth Tynan and Charles Addams, as well as a lot of extras with names like Old B., the Bastard and Chuff. She did not waste her time with intellectuals, but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has ...”

“... might not have mattered so much – even in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet there are some unbelievers, Peter Walker is an honourable example – but his style must have been insufferable. It is not only wickedly witty – better, perhaps, even than Galbraith. From a background of Eton, Balliol, the Guards and the Spectator it is the least some might expect (one ...”

“... In the fierce critiques that the charismatic thinkers of postwar France directed at each other – Lévi-Strauss v. Sartre, Foucault v. Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari v. Lacan, to pick out just a few – the theoretical stakes were high, and the political implications seemed momentous. One could talk, seriously, of the ‘politics of theory’, and many of us distant onlookers did so ...”

“... it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St Peter Port); but also ‘of’ in the sense of ‘made into’. It is Ebenezer made into a book. (Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude comes to mind, with its paper-baler who is finally baled up himself.) William Golding put it admirably when he said: ‘To ...”

“... their individual beliefs (and a number of them had unsavoury pasts in prewar Europe and Vichy France), the European Movement’s members shared a broad political objective: the creation of a unified, democratic, capitalist Western Europe. They were also united in the view that democracy must not get out of hand. It followed, first, that Franco’s Spain ...”

“... of Parnell and Casement. Clever readers of a certain type may object that Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield made rods for their own backs, dug their own graves, committed various sins of hubris and all the rest of it. Milne himself takes an honest and open line in favour of the NUM’s all-out strategy for the defence of the coalfields and the ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed Jenkins and Tony Crosland – ‘more from inertia and indifference than conviction’ – in their move to set up a rival Democratic Socialist Party. It was thus the war which made Healey ...”

“... the Spanish Court in the 17th century any more than Ingres’s can from conditions in 19th-century France. The age makes a contribution, and portrait painters may do so too – I imagine that the way a late 19th-century heiress sat on a sofa was not uninfluenced by Boldini or Sargent – but even the great flatterers had to have something to build ...”