“... that usually ensued. When the abolitionist journalist and underground railroad activist Sydney Howard Gay interviewed fugitives who passed through his office in New York City in the 1850s he found that the threat of sale was a major reason for the decision to run away. Although most Americans today acknowledge the centrality of slavery to antebellum ...”

“... once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure.’ 17 February. Catch part of BBC2’s celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first ...”

“... and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’ His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the US, and devout Christian Scientists. He ...”

“... the Moselle’, one of them playing a trumpet: ‘Wild and sweet leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in wonder – women left their washing.’ Fitzgerald’s ‘flappers’ flocked to Harlem in droves to dance to Duke Ellington’s music at the Savoy and the Cotton Club. Carl Van Vechten, whose novel Nigger Heaven helped to launch the ...”

“... a heap of other bodies down the monumental staircase of the Grand Circle’). He reads Russian, French, German, English, American, Spanish and Japanese books – fiction, philosophy, politics, poetry, history, anthropology ... He sketches his uncle, the writer General Butovsky, in a pair of spliced punchlines. In daily life, he was extraordinarily ...”

“... one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The ...”

“... that the Hollywood studio system was collapsing and that the kind of commercial entertainment the French critics had enjoyed in their youth was being swept aside by Italian films ‘of the highest seriousness’. This was wildly wrong, an attempt to downplay the debt that European cinema owed to American mass culture – at least as large as that owed to ...”

“... and repression, or the failure of these states, in turn, to preserve Italy from domination by the French and Spanish. Enough suggestive comments surface in the course of the dialogues to make clear that all the participants know these unpalatable truths. But they have no forum in which to confront them – only the hope, eloquently expressed but also hedged ...”

“... a ‘cradle king’, was crowned at Stirling in 1567. He was thirteen months old. According to the French envoy Albert Fontenay, he had been ‘nurtured in fear’. When Mary Queen of Scots was pregnant with James, her unfaithful and estranged husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, burst into her room at Holyroodhouse with a band of armed men. After hurling an ...”

“... sections of noble aspect. Here his performance is on a level with what the pensionnaires from the French Academy were producing, year after year, even if he never quite achieved that sublime frigidity which was the ultimate test of the Grand Prix virtuoso. The British Senate House was followed by a mausoleum for the lately deceased Earl of Chatham and this in ...”

“... values were transmitted to Sacchi and Poussin by Domenichino, and on to Carlo Maratta and to the French Academy, hardening into dogma defined in self-righteous opposition to the practice of Caravaggio and his imitators. It might be argued, and is now quite frequently assumed, that the elevated style of the Carracci was ‘élitist’, standing in relation to ...”

“... they have wanted to claim more dignity for the work than its teenage irreverence quite merits. Howard Anderson, introducing the first Oxford edition in 1973, followed the critical fashion of the day in construing the book as a ‘long quest for individual fulfilment’. He saw Ambrosio’s fall as an example of the inward psychological drama that ...”

“... English. That also brought Scotland into sympathy with medieval England’s long-standing foe, the French royal house of Valois. On this basis, a skein of links between France and Scotland endured among the nobility and higher clergy, symbolised visually by Scotland’s consistent rejection of the Perpendicular architectural forms developed in England during ...”

“... by his reliance on concepts drawn not only from John Barrell, but from Habermas, Lawrence Klein, Howard Caygill, Terry Eagleton and Bakhtin, as restated by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The result is both fashionably cultural-materialist and safely old art-historical, supposing paintings to be socially determined primarily by discursive texts of the ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”