“... mangling a Punch doll in her chubby embrace. In pursuit of commissions, he moved the family to Paris in 1829, where they eked out a parlous existence, frequently changing address (‘In my early years,’ Bonheur recalled, ‘we used to migrate with the birds’). She pined for the farmyard animals she had known in Bordeaux, but found some solace in Sunday ...”

“... the bargain reached at Maastricht was of essentially French and German design. The central aim for Paris was a financial edifice capable of replacing the unilateral power of the Bundesbank as the de facto regulator of the fortunes of its neighbours, with a de jure central authority over the European monetary space in which German interests would no longer be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... still lay ahead. In the meantime, Nicholson left England to study at the Académie Julian in Paris.The legacy of the years at Bushey was his encounter with two fellow students, the brother and sister James and Mabel Pryde. Having eloped with Mabel, Nicholson went into artistic partnership with James under the soubriquet of the Beggarstaffs, an old ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”