“... parental newlyweds their amorous children subsequently eloped: first to a flat in Nantes, then to Paris, where Cahun enrolled in the Sorbonne and cultivated an ever more eccentric appearance. She had cut her hair off before leaving Nantes – and I mean really cut it off. In some of the first photo portraits – presumably made with Moore in the 1910s and ...”

“... Louisa, as she called herself, or the lurid stories she published under the pseudonym of A.P. Bernard can imagine Alcott truly enjoying what was steady and slow. Alcott used another English text, Pilgrim’s Progress, to structure the first 24 chapters of Little Women, which were published in October 1868. She was desperate to earn money for her ...”

“... his appeal was not universal, even among newspapermen. When he worked before the war in the Paris office of the Daily Express his relationship with his bureau chief, Geoffrey Cox (later to be editor of ITN), was clearly a prickly one. That was, no doubt, partly because Moorehead always wore his ambition very much on his sleeve. Outside the cartel that ...”

“... articles by Professor Mary Lefkowitz. Winnington-Ingram is also inclined to accept the view of Bernard Knox that the plague in the Oedipus Tyrannus was suggested to Sophocles by the plague that attacked Athens in 430 BC. But there is a plague in the first book of the Iliad, and Sophocles hardly needed a real plague to cause him to add plague to the other ...”

“... off the mark. In no time she was holding lengthy conversations with Maurice Baring, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; interviewing Hilaire Belloc at King’s Land; visiting – she records – ‘ “Father Brown” among his Yorkshire moors’; going to Paris to see one old friend of Chesterton’s and to Indiana to see ...”

“... he might more aptly have labelled him a non-violent intellectual descendant of Babeuf, executed in Paris in 1797 as leader of the Conspiracy of Equals, who believed that when anyone is starving it is a crime to have more than enough. An unrealistic utopia, if you will. But not a pointless or incoherent conception against which to assess and deplore the extent ...”

“... Bataille des VII arts’ (c.1230), Henri d’Andeli depicts a war between the logicians of Paris and the grammarians of Orléans, the last bastion of classical and literary studies. The daughter of Madame Astronomy predicts the date of the battle, Arithmetic counts the troops, and Canon Law rides haughtily in the vanguard. The grammarian Donatus deals ...”

“... censors and the press. In Britain an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best ...”

“... Debray seems to suggest, is that he never lost sight of these older barbarisms in the way the Paris intelligentsia did. For all this, Debray still can’t work out how he failed to grasp at the time what a colossus de Gaulle was. After all, Debray isn’t short of intelligence himself and his intellect was on brilliant display to quite other purposes ...”

“... Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom’. Carmen bin Ladin, the ex-wife of Osama’s brother Yeslam, and Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s widow, have published memoirs to respectful ...”

“... to think obsolete. He would not use broken tombstones to mend a wall. While Down and Out in Paris and London was in the press he was taking an active part in Anglican services and reading the Church Times. He asked to be buried in consecrated ground and in accordance with the rites of the Church of England. Such a man would not have agreed with ...”

“... reading of politics is one of the running themes of his letters from the 1950s to the art critic Bernard Berenson, which have been edited with unobtrusive wit and erudition by Richard Davenport-Hines.* During the Suez crisis of 1956 Trevor-Roper concluded that ‘there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class ...”

“... pricing schemes and shielded trusts which operates in the Square Mile, Geneva, Washington, Paris, the Cayman Islands and other ‘Dracula zones’. This deterministic view sits uneasily alongside the evidence, presented later in the book, that seems to suggest it is a mistake to exonerate greedy businessmen and politicians, whether they are Western or ...”

“... grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson – in Hughes’s mocking words, ‘the disinterested, Goethean sage of I Tatti’ – who charged his employer 25 per cent on the sale of any work he had authenticated. Today there are art advisers at the shoulder of new money; the deference ...”

“... the Netherlands, George Clifford, a director of the Dutch East India Company and plant fancier; in Paris, the brothers and naturalists Antoine and Bernard de Jussieu. In his journals and letters, he often referred to himself in the third person as ‘the archiater’ (royal physician), an honorary title granted him in 1747 ...”