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“... baby – John Locke spoke out against swaddling in Some Thoughts Concerning Education – but in France, despite Rousseau, it had a longer history. As babies make no comment, the relative comfort of papoose mode and free-kicking mode are hard to judge, but decisions about it are the first of many in which children have no say.And their earliest days are ...”

“... tools and so forth – suggest an elegant world not so far from the one Boucher was recording in France. But this advertising art may be misleading. Devis’s group portraits were of a stiff, starchy sort, and in Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode the charm of a pretty interior can become a moral negative. There are no regular patterns of avenue, palace and ...”

“... harder than their English counterparts to win lasting admiration. The efforts of Louis XIV, which Peter Burke chronicles in his new book, were truly staggering, even by the standards of Early Modern monarchy. Images of the King were commissioned, Burke recounts, in paint, bronze, stone, tapestry, pastel, enamel, wood, terracotta and wax. The royal treasury ...”

“... Comforts of Madness is an extended imaginary exposure to what the wretches under his care feel. Peter is a long-term catatonic patient, and the novel takes the form of his interior monologue. Seemingly impervious to the outside world, Peter watches everything around him keenly. It is his choice to switch off – like ...”

“... situation at the time: on the family concerned, on the personality of those who took the actions. France has the best-established scholarly tradition with respect to popular living, a tradition with its headquarters at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris. If L’Amour en plus is compared with an authoritative treatise originating there and ...”

“... to the rest of the world. By this North-West Europe, especially the British Isles, Northern France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, is meant. In this cultural region family groups had been simple in composition and quite modest in size for many centuries before industrialisation. Married children only seldom lived with their parents, and two couples ...”

“... on this subject are the two Michaels, Portillo and Howard, whose fathers were both immigrants, and Peter Lilley, whose holidays in his house in France enabled him to break into colloquial French in the course of a ludicrous comic turn about foreigners coming to this country to partake of the social services which he is ...”

“... of Marie of Champagne: the author of De Amore is described as a capellanus of the royal court of France and nothing in the documents demonstrates that Marie’s chaplain wrote the work. De Amore’s date of composition may be half a century later than the period (the 1180s) favoured by Walsh: any time between 1174 and 1238 is possible. The very existence of ...”

“... it worked to the advantage of the nobility. This was the view taken by another Soviet historian of France, the late Boris Porshnev, and, with more qualifications, it is the view taken by Perry Anderson. It is this second option which Victor Kiernan chooses. He describes absolute monarchy as ‘the aristocratic state’, avoiding terminological disputes about ...”

“... in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces, and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original.’ The ‘propagation of masterpieces’ can be done more or less mechanically, but alongside the lady copyists aspiring to that ...”

“... and absorbing book. The origins of the Abbey – to be precise, the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster – are shrouded in uncertainty. A Saxon foundation on Thorney Island, the one dry spot in the fenland that once stretched from Chelsea to Battersea, the Abbey formed the West minster to St Paul’s East minster. The settlement which, under ...”

“... a flourish: ‘Among the many groups of people who suffered at the hands of the Ancien Régime in France – the insane, the poor, sodomites, alchemists and blasphemers – the impotent have long been forgotten.’ With these words, Darmon carefully places himself in the tradition of the late Michel Foucault, his history of madness as well as his more ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... worlds. Nasser had calculated that there would be a 90 per cent chance of attack from Britain and France up to 10 August, then down to 60 per cent in September, 40 for the first half of October, and 20 thereafter. The rationality of this calculation was borne out by the course of events, as the hot indignation over the Canal’s seizure gave way to cooler and ...”

“... only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was a Papal Army – commanded by Alexander’s brother, Mario Chigi – which was large enough to be a serious drain on the Papal revenues but too small to be taken seriously by the European powers. On the other hand, despite the ...”