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“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”

“... researching my book On the Crofters’ Trail at the time, collecting from people whatever their grand or great-grandparents had told them about the High-land Clearances, when landlords desperate to increase the income from their land forced many thousands of small tenants from their homes by a mixture of bribery, threats and the torching of their ...”

“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... something of the effect of Daniel Drouin’s wisecrack. An unknown criminal has been dismantling grand pianos in bankers’ houses, skillfully taking the instruments apart and stacking the pieces against a wall or in a fireplace. The malefactor is never caught, and his motives can only be guessed at. Has he understood, for example, the connection between ...”

“... From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title, as he explains in his Introduction, is a ‘multiple pun’ composed of one ideogram each from the names of the three principal female protagonists ...”

“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are ...”

“... with the awfulness of the period, setting the scene for a well-timed explosion of gossip and dirt. David Beckham, who once had a golden right foot, a sweet face, a high voice and a famous willingness to sit around in branded underpants while being photographed by the world’s press, might have proved a sensational subject all by himself, a ...”

“... As a result, only a few such studies have earned widespread critical acclaim: Plumb’s Walpole (a grand opera, complete with overture, but still lacking its third act); Lady Longford’s Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician ...”

“... to be told abruptly that it was all off: a ballot of trade-union members had gone against the grand plan, and that was it. It had been a very grand plan. With the backing of the Royal Commission on the Press which reported at about the same time (as with most Royal Commissions its work eventually led to practically ...”

“... the museum Taniguchi provides unexpected glimpses of nearby buildings.) You then turn to mount a grand stairway where you are greeted, on the first landing, by the bluff Balzac by Rodin – not an obvious host except that here you first see, through a gorgeous glass curtain-wall, the Sculpture Garden below, which Taniguchi has spruced up with pools, trees ...”

“... We acquire mementos: an Eiffel Tower cigarette lighter, a mug from Margate, Michelangelo’s David on a key-ring. All say, in one way or another: ‘I was there.’ It is not just airport art and souvenir-shop knick-knacks that commemorate time in foreign parts. Trophies brought home by Grand Tourists and modern travellers – bits of marble and views of Venice, archaeological finds, sculpture hacked from ancient monuments, exotic pots and textiles – all are mementos as well as art-loot and museum specimens ...”

“... In his perspective, ‘diplomacy’ is not the profession of ambassadors or lesser diplomats, but grand strategy, the vision that statesmen must have in the face of a dangerous world, transcending obstructive bureaucracies and benighted domestic politics. Kissinger’s message is above all an appeal to US politicians to conceive of foreign policy as a means ...”

“... Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?’ wrote J.M. Keynes of David Lloyd George in 1919. ‘How can I convey to the reader ... any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character ...”

“... David Halle’s researches earned him a licence amateur voyeurs would kill for. He got to nose about, more or less at will, in other people’s rooms. His study of the landscapes, portraits, snapshots, saints, masks and so forth which a representative group of Americans, in and near New York, have on their walls and shelves, of how they display them and what they say about them, required that he get to know more than a hundred and sixty different houses ...”

“... of Purbeck, as you might scratch the downland soil for flint tools, and well-known names and grand if forgotten individuals lie on every hand. Moreover, because of the vicissitudes of the area, the members of this remarkable roll-call were often engaged with a cluster of deeply interesting issues: locality, ruralness, land-use, community, patriotism, the ...”