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“... Professor Duby confines his attention to the main source for William’s life, a poem in Norman French of some twenty thousand lines commissioned by his son and written a few years after William’s death. The personal memoirs of William – for it is as such that he treats the text – are those, otherwise hardly accessible, of the knightly classes of the ...”

“... occupation of improving’, even as he tried to make a go now of one thing, now of another. Howard Feinstein has written a brilliant study of William’s crises over idleness, illness and vocation, within the context of intense parental and sibling entanglements, especially as these lead back to his father’s own conflicts with his father, the fearsome ...”

“... they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that London feared French ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean, Nicholas hoped for an understanding with the British. Returning to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed ...”

“... of this kind’. One expects that sort of thing from Portillo, who probably thinks Lebanon is French and something to do with the European Union and therefore to be opposed. Rifkind should know better. Probably he does. Before we left London I had the impression that, with Rifkind away in Bolivia or somewhere, our attitude was being laid down not by the ...”

“... patrician composure suggestive of Burt Lancaster playing Lampedusa’s Leopard. Neither Vidal nor Howard Auster, his long-standing companion, swam in the pool, which was even more impressively blue than the sea at the foot of the cliff. Sunshine, cypresses, cicadas, scented air, the physical drama: all the sense-heightening Mediterranean stuff. Kurt ...”

“... the abolition of monarchy and established Church, liberty for Dissenters, support for American and French rebels, the expectation of a swift arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And, to make matters worse, Priestley reckoned all these views were firmly based on the most up-to-date sciences, such as the electricity and chemistry he did so much to ...”

“... scale (or reputation) and is now more likely to be seen savouring the small pungent epiphanies of Howard Hodgkin than gazing at a Rauschenberg, however huge. It is almost as if the younger gallery-goer had already digested Charles Harrison’s salutary and illuminating study of the theory and practice of Modernist art in England, with its detailed clinical ...”

“... dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank ...”

“... All the same, if Anglophone readers are after a Chinese spy novel, Xiao Bai’s historically rich French Concession, set in 1930s Shanghai, will be published by Harper Collins next year, and is a better bet than Mai Jia’s potboiler. Perry Link wrote a balanced review – marginally favourable – of Decoded in the New York Times. This was difficult for Mai ...”

“... mordant, furious. The novel opens in 1962, at a party in London, where 19-year-old Audrey Howard, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, a secretary with an angry reserve and a nearly crushing sense of her own ignorance, watches Joel Litvinoff, white-toothed and brilliant, an American lawyer with the physical assurance of an athlete and the ...”

“... sous les auspices de la reine (Paris, 1790) demonstrates a far from reverent attitude towards the French royal family. In one scene Lafayette is described having intercourse with Marie Antoinette while being simultaneously buggered by Bailly. Marie Antoinette declares that her only pleasure is to be foutue en con and wants to engage a whole regiment of ...”

“... in the 1790s; The Police and the People (1970), his first monograph in English, concerned French popular protest in the decades after the Revolution; Reactions to the French Revolution (1972) ranged beyond the metropole to the records of the départements for individual perspectives on the Revolution ‘from ground ...”

“... that we can understand. It reminded me of the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), where the French woman talks about all she has seen in Hiroshima and the Japanese man responds: ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima.’ Marines marching in Danang in 1965. Is it a sign of civilisation that we want to tell the story of our disasters without breaking ...”

“... a startling and unlikely candidate: a translation of a mystical meditation into English from French made by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. The Glass of the Sinful Soul, as she called it, was not an original work, but a good pupil’s exercise, undertaken in 1544 at the age of 11 as part of her lessons. A long prayer by Marguerite de Valois, Queen ...”

“... well and the best course is surely to acknowledge this, as in the life of Butler by Anthony Howard and that of Macmillan by Alistair Horne. The alternative strategy is that adopted by Rhodes James on Eden: to defend his hero on every conceivable count, from geopolitical insight (Eden alone discerned the scale of the Soviet menace) to personal foibles ...”