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“... to odd thoughts, close descriptions of minutiae and masturbation scenarios. His narrators read Maurice Baring, A.C. Benson, Hopkins, Swinburne and Iris Murdoch. In Room Temperature, Mike takes a copy of Mark Pattison’s Isaac Casaubon to read on a plane; in the novel’s closing sentence he picks up a copy of the TLS. And on top of being a great observer ...”

“... in a style and on subjects he might find interesting, a fitting tribute to a historian who has a keen eye for popular amusements and pastimes (from gambling to dancing to trade unionism) and the wit to take them seriously. Some familiar themes emerge. McKibbin, like Stedman Jones and Joyce, wanted to understand the relative fragility of socialism and the ...”

“... of Catholics. He was fluent in French – he wrote a biography of Voltaire – and was always keen to explore cultural difference, whether between east and west, France, England, Scotland or the Netherlands. He spent two years in Edinburgh studying medicine, and perhaps a year in Leiden, before setting off on his own version of a grand tour, travelling on ...”

“... be unmarked by conscious virtuosity or literary influence, there are unmissable hints that he is keen to position it within a sophisticated tradition. Take ‘The Boat’, written in the late 1960s, one of several stories whose theme is the essential unknowability of the people we are related to. The teller of this tale is the teenage son of Cape Breton ...”

“... himself ‘honoured and awed’ to be standing in Arnold’s place. Like Arnold, he is ‘keen on Celtic poetry’ and concludes his lecture by quoting in full Eilis Dillon’s translation of Eileen O’Connell’s famous 18th-century Gaelic poem, ‘The Lament for Arthur O’Leary’. In a bizarre critical judgment which might be seen as a form of ...”

“... monarchy to explain the way the pressures of the First World War remade his dynasty. Although keen to establish the king as a player in wartime decision-making, most notably when he was championing Douglas Haig, Jones sees his contribution as having less to do with what he did than with his status, which made him the object of generous patriotic ...”

“... of the necessary conditions of bringing up healthy children’, as Major General Sir Frederick Maurice put it. Declining birth rates, rising infant mortality and anxieties about securing the empire focused government attention on the new ‘science’ of mothercraft.The early decades of the 20th century saw the rise of a culture of expertise around child ...”

“... Macron acknowledged France’s responsibility in the murder of the pro-independence militant Maurice Audin, a communist mathematician who was ‘disappeared’ in 1957 – but passed over in silence in the extrajudicial murders of FLN leaders such as Ali Boumendjel and Larbi Ben M’hidi, who were ‘suicided’ in French custody during the Battle of ...”

“... front’.Carey is excellent at sketching biographies, quoting judiciously and generously, and keen to be explanatory without being patronising: you can see in the use of anecdote and analogy the experience of years lecturing to drifting undergraduates. (The Elizabethans fretted about whether or not they were damned, he explains at one point, rather like ...”

“... Kingsman, the pre-1914 welfare economist A.C. Pigou, whose lack of interest in ideology and keen interest in young mountaineers was supposedly deliberate cover enabling him to suborn those politically committed to the left. (As will be seen, King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth ...”

“... Mattias Habich as Yudishthira is a flaxen-haired Dürer knight searching for the true path; Maurice Benichou, who is French but of a North African Jewish family, has Mediterranean ease and a childlike gravity as Krishna; Alain Maratrat as Vyasa the poet has the Ancient Mariner authority of a Breton or Welsh bard; the British actor Bruce Myers as ...”

“... of course, his great opposite Raymond Aron, the eminent philosopher and Ecole Normale classmate Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who left the journal a few years later), and Michel Leiris, ethnographer, Africanist and bullfight theoretician. There wasn’t a major issue that Sartre and his circle didn’t take on, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted ...”

“... the other connection he is refusing is that of the fictional don Sillery with the historical Maurice Bowra. But then Powell adds that rereading his own novels ‘brought Malcolm to mind more than once in case of Bagshaw, quite involuntary on my part’. Bagshaw is ‘not in the front rank of literary critics’, indeed we are told ‘there might have ...”

“... Several, like Justin Brooke, had been pupils at Bedales, which, progressive and co-educational, keen on camping and acting, represented an attempt to break away from the public school ethos encapsulated by Rugby. The group had its own rules, which Brooke recapitulated to Katherine Cox, whom he met when she was treasurer of the Fabians, and with whom he ...”

“... Sartre’s in discussions of existentialism grated on him, and helps to explain why he was so keen to disavow his ties to the movement.) He was an editor at Gallimard and the leader writer for Combat, the newspaper of the Resistance, which he’d joined in 1944 under the nom de guerre Albert Mathé. With his heroic wartime record, good looks (Camus ...”