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“... Like Strachey’s Dr Arnold, Louis Pasteur was all ‘energy, earnestness and the best intentions’. The anti-clerical Third Republic made him its principal intercessor with the invisible world. It erected an absurdly baroque shrine to his memory at the Institut Pasteur and named more streets after him than after any other historical figure, save that Republic’s founder, Gambetta ...”

“... Jacques-Louis Ménétra was an 18th-century glazier who worked for abbesses, for aristocrats, and for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s landlord. Like Rousseau, but unlike any other artisan of his time, Ménétra has left an account of an adventurous life, full of journeyman’s wanderings, picaresque characters and amorous conquests. In his 19th year the aspiring craftsman left his embattled Parisian family for the artisan’s traditional tour de France ...”

“... but it’s lively, witty and draws effectively on Blum’s massive and eloquent correspondence. Arthur Goldhammer has, as usual, produced a lucid, engaging English text. Birnbaum seems to have written the book in some haste: he repeats facts and quotations, and makes a few historical slips – France was not a ‘largely peasant nation’ in ...”

“... if a translation of this book was really necessary. At least Princeton had the sense to engage Arthur Goldhammer, who is not only in a position to draw on his own brilliant translation of Democracy in America for the passages quoted by Jaume, but has often managed to render Jaume’s prose more fluid than the original. Second, by focusing so intently ...”

“... The fourth volume of A History of Private Life, originally published in 1987 and now translated by Arthur Goldhammer, is considerably less impressive. Splendidly illustrated and full of good things, it suffers from parochialism and an excess of flabby fashionability. A history of private life was bound, of course, to be an intensely difficult project. As ...”

“... to enter into death with open eyes.’ The translation of M. Galey’s interviews has been made by Arthur Goldhammer, working with the nervous precision demanded by his knowledge that Mme Yourcenar is herself a fastidious translator: she has translated The Waves and What Maisie Knew into French. With Open Eyes is an engaging introduction to her ...”

“... detail and vast quantities of skilfully assembled data; it is written (and translated, by Arthur Goldhammer) in an accessible, conversational tone. But Piketty’s vital contribution is somewhat obscured by the book’s title. He is not in the business of uncovering the ideological dynamics that make the interests of the powerful appear to ...”

“... It is against the nature of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices ... should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character ...”

“... One night in 1130, King Henry I had a nightmare. He dreamed that he was being attacked, first by a crowd of peasants, then by a group of knights, and finally by a number of clerics. For many historians, this detail, recorded by the chronicler John of Worcester, would be no more than a fascinating piece of useless information. For Professor Jacques Le Goff, it is a clue which helps us to understand the 12th century a little better ...”

“... This is the story of a goatherd who progressed through destitution and self-education to become the printer of the first edition of Calvin’s greatest work and one of the most respected teachers in Reformation Switzerland. It is also the story of his son, who trained as a doctor, fostered a household of four children, and died leaving 42 musical instruments, a set of skeletons and other bones of creatures from mouse to mammoth (he believed the latter to have belonged to a huge man), a tulip garden, artefacts from across the whole of the newly-discovered globe, stuffed crocodiles and a live elk that doubled as a lawnmower ...”

“... In this very short book about a very long murder Alain Corbin returns, as he puts it, ‘to the peasants of my youth (or at any rate to their traces in the archives)’. And he returns with new sensibilities shaped by new methodological tools. Listening to his rural actors with ‘a fresh ear’, he identifies the ‘alchemy’ of a violent event which, in the history of modern France, represents the ‘last outburst of peasant rage to result in murder ...”

“... of Realms of Memory, and the quality of the translation itself isn’t a patch on those done by Arthur Goldhammer, which might lead some to fear we’re being given only leftovers. In fact the riches of Les Lieux de mémoire are so considerable that even after all three of the new English volumes have appeared, approximately a third of the original ...”

“... Very good, Mr Hardy. Excellent poetry, especially in a time of the breaking of nations (1915). One of time’s universals. ‘War’s annals will cloud into night/Ere their story die.’ But what if you haven’t invented the harrow yet? Or indeed the collar for harnessing horses? The former is not seen till the Bayeux Tapestry; the date of the latter is much debated, but is definitely a Medieval, not an antique invention ...”

“... are determined to read the historical sources sideways. They read romances and ask why King Arthur had to be bled in public. They read sermons on lust and ask what these imply about dormitory arrangements. The drive of their collective work is to inquire whether the Medieval psyche was at all like the modern one, or was inevitably altered by lower ...”

“... December​ 1938 in a large provincial city. It’s the last chance for the council to agree the municipal budget; in the chamber a reporter from the local paper tries to wring a bit of fun from a drab occasion. As a dignitary ploughs through a lengthy preamble, restless councillors begin to doodle (one makes a paper windmill from the minutes of an earlier meeting ...”