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“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... in the evanescent Norse discovery of America than in their well-chronicled activities in France and historically decisive foundation of Normandy. All four may be described as coffee-table books, and all four sustain their publishers’ well-earned reputation for superb illustrations – though a symbolic reductio ad absurdum of modern techniques is ...”

“... In politics, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle explain for the benefit of their less worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation and deviousness ...”

“... rescued her from the unwelcome attentions of a soi-disant army captain, and eloped with her to France. On their return, Sheridan fought two duels on Eliza’s account; once married, the couple relied on Sheridan’s income as a theatre manager (he bought a controlling interest in the Drury Lane Theatre at the age of 25), and his earnings from the three ...”

“... the watering holes, brothels, law courts and jails of Paris, the Loire valley and other parts of France. In his early thirties he was charged with the murder of a priest in the course of a quarrel. He went into hiding and appealed to the courts for remission, which was granted. The following year – 1456 – there was a robbery at the theology faculty of ...”

“... Heaven and Hell’ excludes Leicester from heaven principally on the grounds of lust. After St Peter has interrogated him at length about his involvement in various murders, extortions and usurpations, he is almost persuaded by a show of repentance to admit him even so. St Peter threw open the gate and his Earlship most ...”

“... him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his ...”

“... real liberation. Financed by the family trusts, she made her way in 1916 to the battlefields of France, where she drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross. Between runs to the trenches, she shared a flat in Montparnasse with several other girl-drivers, one of whom, Dolly Wilde, louche niece of Oscar and member of the expatriate lesbian circle around ...”

“... that she was writing a novel and that it was about a young man’s adventures in the South of France, her mother had apparently said: ‘I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’ (‘Billi’ was what her family called the young Sybille.) ‘God forbid, mummy,’ Billi replied. But mummy was sure of her ground: ‘One ...”

“... fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed. In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin ...”

“... the fortune that he had inherited from his father. Before it ended, Scott absconded once more to France. ‘I am in rather a droll position,’ he told a friend: I have been declared legally a lunatic and, though perfectly capable of managing other people’s affairs, incapable of managing my own affairs in England, while here in ...”

“... where Le Corbusier was born in 1887, lies a thousand feet up in the Jura, only a few miles from France. The largely 19th-century town was built on a strict grid, and housed a Calvinist population steeped in the puritanism that he both loathed and made his own. Edouard (his name in the family) referred to it as a ‘leprous place’ and revelled in his ...”

“... global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised ...”

“... lengths, mainly about directors, arranged alphabetically, and chiefly by writers from Britain, France and the United States. Roud himself supplies 17 of them, including perceptive essays on Bresson and Renoir; he has chosen the fine illustrations, and he makes supplementary comments, often with book-lists, alongside the entries themselves. ‘Most of the ...”

“... As Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russias, lay dying in 1725, the future of the Imperial dynasty hung on his choice of successor. Peter, the first to take the title of emperor, had issued a law granting to himself the power to appoint whoever he liked as successor, but had continued to ponder the question, having had his own eldest son condemned and executed for serving as a rallying-point for opposition ...”