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“... of farting in a space vehicle. Richard Olney, an American expert on food and wine who has lived in France since 1951, has many qualities, but humour is not one. The second and revised edition of The French Menu Cookbook contains the same catholic selection of recipes as the first, but has additional material in its very instructive introductory section on menu ...”

“... later voices spoke from within a flood of light to Joan of Arc, urging her to save the kingdom of France. Christ was a god of what Potter describes as ‘private moments’, a god Constantine ‘met on his own and who provided him with guidance on an intensely personal basis’. When Constantine conquered Rome in 312, the flamboyant Christian buildings he ...”

“... political writings which emerged late in his career. It was the career of a teacher, chiefly in France at the college of Sainte-Barbe in Paris and as professor of Latin at Bordeaux, and in Portugal at Coimbra. He was tutor to Montaigne and, most famously, to James VI and I, whose political views he can have engendered only by opposition. He was a friend to ...”

“... Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret ...”

“... gradually became more formal and more centralised. First the bishops became involved, acting, as Peter Brown puts it in his brilliant study The Cult of the Saints, as ‘spiritual impresarios’. Then it was the turn of the Popes, such as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an ...”

“... a little more attention paid to his finery – including the gold chain he had from the King of France. Or then again, as a note here suggests, he may have been taking care of his ‘delicate relationship’ with Cosimo by distancing himself from Titian, who owed Cosimo a portrait. (Aretino made his money lampooning and flattering princes. Titian was at ...”

“... a place of refuge and fantasy’. It is one of those destinations – ‘like the South of France before Peter Mayle, and Tuscany before champagne socialists’ – which, it is assumed, is ‘unspoilt by the American coffee shops and the malls and the ring roads that have ruined Arnoldian England’. But as Sansom ...”

“... medicine will tell us a quite different story from politics, and certain classes of Belle Epoque France, say, were doing very nicely compared to Russian serfs – and we can argue philosophically about whether the idea of the moral improvement of a whole civilisation is even coherent. But what Yeats is showing us is not how things were but how he and his ...”

“... superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London ...”

“... expense of the Left. The last four of these points are the most relevant to the British case. In France, where the socialist tradition is predominantly Marxist, the revisionist thrust has gone to the very heart of the Marxist historicist credo, and has also, quite unlike what has been happening here, taken a sharp anti-Soviet and pro-American ...”

“... in which architect and engineer egg each other on to ever greater excesses. Saint concentrates on France, Britain and the US, with asides on Switzerland and Germany. Sometimes he follows an audit trail to make sure that credit has been given where it’s due. For instance, the US Army Corps of Engineers owed something of its organisation and training to a ...”

“... common servant, but her unusual beauty and even more unusual luck brought her to the attention of Peter the Great, who made her first his mistress, then his wife, and finally his successor. She became Tsarina Catherine I, and from 1725 to 1727 she reigned as absolute monarch over an empire that already stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific. ...”

“... light on the issue of whether ameliorism worked. Did the experts do any good? Charles Madge and Peter Willmott compare Inner-City Poverty in Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers ...”

“... networks with the same first indications of an American strike against Libya. In New York, I watch Peter Jennings on ABC largely as a matter of habit, although the other anchormen seem to produce roughly the same results. Jennings opened by announcing that something was happening in Tripoli; then he passed things over to two correspondents there who, from ...”

“... in opposition’. This sad shake of the head segues effortlessly into mention of poor persecuted Peter Mandelson, who has suffered so terribly at the hands of a remorseless and unforgiving press. ‘The standards of manners and courtesy have dropped,’ Mandelson told Lloyd (‘in his rooms in the Commons’), ‘there’s a lack of any kind of respect for ...”