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“... as the most eminent doctor in the whole of the Italian peninsula, saved the son. In May 1512 the French took the son to Milan as a hostage but in October, when the Venetians retook the city, he returned and was elected to the city council. (The Venetians took the city again in 1516 after a period of three years when the Spanish held it; it was during this ...”

“... Observer in 1950 not to take the Schuman Plan too seriously and in 1955 prophesying that ‘the French will never go into the “common market”.’ Rab later remembered that, when the Dutch foreign minister came over to try to persuade Britain to join, ‘I got very bored with him and so did everyone else.’ Who were the Dutch to presume to tell the ...”

“... with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually ...”

“... is not sounded, and the spelling of its first citation, from Fenimore Cooper, 1827, points to the French derivation: “At the most renowned of the Parisian restaurans”.’ This is a good instance of the sort of knowledge you will pick up from Ricks and McCue’s commentary as an unexpected bonus. It illustrates their generous wish to impart as much ...”

“... in the fragmentary memoir called ‘Sex’, written in the Locked Diary but sadly excluded by Philip Gardner, ‘My instinct has never given me true information about sex’; ‘not till I was 30 did I know exactly how male and female joined’ – that is to say, when he was writing Howards End, with its extramarital pregnancy that ‘deeply ...”

“... And the writing has such crooked vitality: the vernacular bumping against the spoilt, jaunty French, the slap of the phrases. What is most appealing is the quality of self-mockery. It is hard not to feel that Lawrence finds himself as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic ...”

“... Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French emigration of the 1790s, at Coblenz, where it reproduced all of the fantasies and the incompetence, in heightened degree, of the Ancien Régime, before petering out, in the next two decades, into a set of ...”

“... of science policy being expounded to a large gathering of Spanish scientists. A distinguished French civil servant drew charts of an interlocking structure of bureaux and conseils. A Harvard professor explained that the only way to do it was to exploit the creative rivalry between autonomous Federal agencies. Sir Brian Flowers (now Lord Flowers – one of ...”

“... ancient world, was a myth. But Sand also endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems ...”

“... Bertolucci, while he has been faithfully unfaithful only with Nicole. When she hangs up her French-maid garter, he may find himself bereft, his hand having nowhere to land. He ponders the last years of the Marquis de Sade, patron saint of cruel scatology and role model, observing that at the age of 50 he began an affair with an actress twenty years his ...”

“... Robin is ‘quintessentially, racially, English’, largely because of his hostility to the Norman French, but it was Scott who traced Robin back to the Saxons (as Stukeley had traced him back to Normans) and racialised the Saxons. In the Errol Flynn film, Robin is rich – but a Saxon, and therefore OK. The Norman cliché even gets into the Disney ...”

“... often jeering response. Only a few answered the insults in kind: Empson’s correspondence with Philip Hobsbaum, who was his pupil but disagreed with some of the basic tenets, is full of rude words and anger on both sides. In this case the insults were part of what Empson called ‘my long attempt to improve the mind of Hobsbaum’, and Hobsbaum, defying ...”

“... a similar background.In Michel Houllebecq’s most recent novel, Serotonin, published last year, French dairy farming was seen as a heroic anachronism doomed by the implacable centralising agenda of the EU. Its Dutch equivalent here is a squalid, precarious and (thanks to the ingrained attitudes of the Dutch Reformed Church) benighted way of life. The word ...”

“... Orwell would have disliked New Labour. Am reminded of an essay written by the sociologist Philip Abrams back in 1964 in which he complained about ‘the difficulties our political leaders evidently have in saying exactly what they mean when they speak of “modernising” British society’.5 November 1997. To hear Lord Nolan give the annual Dimbleby ...”

“... cotton wool. The act was as intimate and warm as the act of sex.’ In 1981, in a letter to his French translator, Alain Delahaye, McGahern describes laying out the brother of a neighbour in the company of a chemist from Dublin who kept adjusting the mouth: ‘I knew this pursuit of perfection could go on all night. The murmurs outside the door were ...”