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“... of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the moment when they were written, whether from Victorian and Edwardian confidence in robust parliamentary government, or from post-imperial decline, or the ...”

“... needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) locates its perfect society in ‘spacious vales and lofty mountains, pleasant verdure and groves of stately trees’. This particular utopia smells good, whereas most of them are odourless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and ...”

“... it seemed that Tsipras’s strategy of dividing Europe – and even breaking the link between France and Germany – had worked. Yet during the night of the summit, as one EU insider reported, Merkel and Hollande ‘crucified’ Tsipras. No matter what he conceded, they, playing good cop/bad cop, responded that it was not enough to rebuild ...”

“... is no trace of her residence in England in the early 1860s, and Dickens may have installed her in France to bear a child or children unseen. A servant, however, testified in later life that the relationship between the couple had been entirely innocent. The constructions which have been put on the evidence vary. Katharine Longley – on whose research Claire ...”

“... Benzo of Alba and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, we might be tempted to think that the history of France and Germany a millennium ago can offer us nothing more than the dreary spectacle of one barbarian succeeding another on the banks of the Seine or the Rhine. Even the fame of the great figures of the period makes them less than real to us, turning them into ...”

“... Blanford, one of them supposedly the other’s creation, and both a curious blend of Oscar Wilde, Peter Pan and l’homme moyen sensuel. The mist of uncertain identity which shrouds Sutcliffe and Blanford radiates out to the other members of the charmed circle. Monsieur, like Justine at the commencement of the ‘Alexandria Quartet’, must now be regarded as ...”

“... in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection. Goldsmith is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his brother, Teddy. Sam White, the Paris columnist of the Evening Standard, and a long-standing friend of Goldsmith, suggested to Richard Ingrams, as the heat died down, that the ‘services’ mistake was really a ...”

“... title for the third section of his book, which describes Brecht and Benjamin in the South of France, discussing Proust and Schiller’s court case, debating whether a play could be made out of a detective story, and plotting to set up an International Society of Materialist Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic – this organisation was ...”

“... circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring – Russia and France 1882-1934. Taruskin’s book goes as far as the opera Mavra, while Walsh’s first volume gets to the beguiling melodrama Persephone and the beginning of work on the Concerto for two pianos. On the way he takes in Stravinsky’s astonishing self-creation ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”

“... scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz (Luxembourg). In the work of these and other scholars, the dynamics of European integration emerge in a cooler, more searching light than in van Middelaar’s panegyrics, revealing what these omit ...”

“... been sent from Sirius to found a secret brotherhood on earth, is certainly one of the strangest. Peter Sellers should be living at this hour to play P.B., a cross between the retarded sage of Being There and the monk of Terry Southern’s Candy. Born Raphael Hurst, a Jewish Londoner, in 1898, P.B. transformed himself by means of cosmetic surgery, extensive ...”

“... their creativity. Although Jews have made a notable contribution to the literature of England and France, Italy and Russia, their achievements (Reich-Ranicki claims) are not remotely comparable to those of German Jews, who experienced more extreme forms of persecution and anguish. His roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin ...”

“... scythe towards Singapore.’ The blurb-writer has got his campaign wrong. That was May 1940, in France and Belgium, when the opponents were German. The Japanese forces landed in Malaya were considerably smaller than the Allied armies facing them, but under the redoubtable General Yamashita (hanged in 1948 for war crimes), they knew what to do and how to do ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”