“... given Pétain’s status as the ‘Victor of Verdun’ and France’s saviour, according to the young Captain Charles de Gaulle – wounded and taken prisoner under Pétain’s command – ‘when a choice had to be made between ruin and reason’. In 1945, de Gaulle chose to muffle the divisions of the Vichy regime by finding national unity in the ...”

“... a base supplied by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and topped off perhaps with an astringent dash of Roger Hinks’. Mrs Spurling’s own dealings with these conjectural parenthoods and genealogies are more circumspect, and do – or so I judge – often sensitively illuminate the traffic of the creative imagination with fugitive memories drawn from ...”

“... a miniature newscaster. ‘They died instantly.’ Cushla Lavery, the class’s teacher and the young Catholic protagonist of Trespasses, Louise Kennedy’s first novel, hates the ritual of The News and the specialist vocabulary it inculcates. ‘Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act.’ But the headmaster refuses to drop it, on the ...”

“... popular opinion. It has sent other Arab governments into a panic while raising the hopes of their young, frustrated populations. If the revolution in Egypt succeeds, it will have swept away not only a corrupt and autocratic regime, but the vocabulary, and the patterns of thought, that have underpinned Western policy in the greater Middle East for more than a ...”

“... as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other ...”

“... There are​ few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses. Or take Ingres’s earlier but equally celebrated portrayal of the Baronne de Rothschild, a woman Heinrich Heine compared to an angel ...”

“... own country. For the rest of the world, however, the book slept in obscurity, till, in 1958, Roger Caillois published a new edition of the first fourteen or so days. It created a considerable stir. The hunt for a complete text was renewed; and, this failing, René Radrizzani produced a reconstruction of it, drawing on various newly-found partial ...”

“... In adjacent fields social history has achieved surprising levels of sophistication, capped by Roger Cooter’s provocative study of phrenology as an intellectual instrument of self-help liberalism and social control (The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, 1984). But hardly any attempt has been made to apply this sort of approach to Darwinism – to ...”

“... Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t ...”

“... St Petersburg, he was the ringleader of a group of literary boys with close contacts to the best young Russian writers – including M.A. Kuzmin, a predatory but thrillingly rebellious gay who roped the young Mirsky and his friends into a homoerotic salon. Politically, Dmitry had no time for the doomed efforts to turn ...”

“... face of this severe judgment on Dr Burney’s part in his daughter’s story, that his biographer Roger Lonsdale saw Fanny Burney as the villainess in her father’s story. In Dr Charles Burney he accused her of conscious dishonesty and ruthless egoism in her Memoirs of her father, in which she was found guilty of having schemed – by omission, distortion ...”

“... involved in the study of the mechanisms and motives which brought together work opportunities and young people, new lands and their settlers, advertising techniques and land speculators, penology and the need for a labour force. They also show that in the task of laboriously finding out who went where, and why, migration theory has little to offer to the ...”

“... an aged, snow-bearded Satan who used black slavery to get money, and money to buy the favours of young girls. The quotation is from Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated, published more than thirty years ago. Many stories deserve retelling for each generation; and the tale of Leopold’s duplicity, lubriciousness and greed, and of the cruelties and ...”

“... state that started out as an independent nation’. Ransom had recruited scholars and writers like Roger Shattuck, Donald Carne-Ross, William Arrowsmith and others who would have been more likely to land in the Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The ...”

“... was a super-patriot – ‘la France quand même’ – whose pictorial History of Alsace Told for Young Children shows a succession of bespectacled Teutons bumbling through Alsatian villages while freshly rinsed children with black bows and tricolour rosettes in their hair laugh at them behind their backs. But there is an older, more harrowing influence ...”