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“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...”

“... by radicals. Although he belonged to a different branch of Whiggery from the more francophile Charles James Fox, Pitt too was a Whig. He never described himself as anything else, and had championed parliamentary reform during the 1780s. At Horne Tooke’s treason trial, the reformer claimed that he was only repeating what Pitt himself had said a decade ...”

“... a parody of Yeats’s anthology piece, any more than Beckett’s Worstward Ho is a parody of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!. Brett has therefore come up with almost the only way of being calumniatingly unjust to Ezra Pound. And, even-handedly, to Pound’s impugners. J.B. Morton was often funny and acute, but his philistine squib against ...”

“... Balmerino and Lord Kilmarnock used their last moments together to dismiss the idea that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, their ‘bonnie prince’, could have signed such an order. They both ‘vehemently denied’ it before they walked to the scaffold. Whether Cumberland himself was aware of the forgery, or even arranged it, is not known.The duke was ...”

“... of an ancient mariner, cursed by his fates and doomed to range eternally through the world without hope of port or saviour.Johnson seemed destined to remain a cipher. But, incredibly, it turns out there’s a person who still recalls him quite clearly, his stepsister, Annye C. Anderson, now 96. ‘First time I remember Brother Robert,’ she says in her ...”

“... results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.Perhaps that is why few historians tell us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man ...”

“... expression and modernism.’ There was, rather, a continuum of architecture and sculpture. In 1931 Charles Reilly, sometime head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, published Representative British Architects of the Present Day, which, Stamp notes, ‘is representative of the period by being so very unrepresentative’. He ascribes the conspicuous absence ...”

“... fate to have stick to him all the pornographic and profane verse that emanated from the court of Charles II. Abstruse pornography has always had a special appeal for scholars, or rather did have, as long as they were unmated males living a collegiate existence. Most scholars are still loth to give up their frigged-out version of Rochester. Eleven years after ...”

“... of a local dry cleaner. They moved to Cincinnati. She named the baby after her dead father, Charles. She was 16. And she was still a bit wild. She kept going out most nights, and after three years William divorced her for ‘gross neglect of duty’. She filed a bastardy suit against Scott, and won $5 a month in child support. She got $25 on her day in ...”

“... another paperback writer has proved to be more of an embarrassment than Platell could ever hope to be. One does not envy Platell her new job – look at the material she has to work with – but perhaps she has had enough of the ‘sexy and scandalous’ world of journalism. I, too, would like to think that the world of journalism was sexy and ...”

“... of a young girl; and finally his journey back to Shanghai after the Japanese invasion, in the hope of tracking down the criminals involved in the novel’s central mystery. The only constant in Banks’s life is his aspiration ‘to be a “Sherlock” ’ and this novel seems to return us to the Shanghai of Auden and Isherwood and to the fictional worlds ...”

“... disempowerment. To such Americans, the Federal Government has appeared, in the words of Senator Charles Sumner, a 19th-century advocate of black rights, not as a danger to liberty but as the ‘custodian of freedom’. Brands’s single-minded concern with the relationship between war, powerful government and liberalism does have the virtue of providing the ...”

“... that year, however, with the arrival of Howard K. Beale.Beale was a disciple of the historian Charles Beard, who taught that political ideology was a mask for economic self-interest. Beale had recently published The Critical Year, in which he followed Beard in viewing the Civil War not as a struggle over slavery but as a second American Revolution, which ...”

“... are sincere and eloquent. They are honest, diplomatic, realistic, but with a painful undertone of hope. There were a few happy months in Geneva together with Mary and Shelley; but when Claire became pregnant Byron acknowledged paternity (‘she has had a good deal of that same with me’) and refused to see her again. Although for a long time Claire’s ...”

“... but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom double-barrelled names tend to be for dimbos): no one with a name quite so obviously heedless could enjoy more ...”