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“... but the most loyal of friends. He’s a half-breed and a bastard. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American accent. He’s good at getting banged up, consigned to the hospital bed, the bin, the re-education camp, a dank basement or an empty warehouse staring into the barrel of a gun. He’s the offspring of paedophilia. He’s ...”

“... her lips. The Antiquary was published in 1816, not long after the Allies had insisted that the French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre. Major works (by Titian, Raphael and probably Van Eyck, as well as by Spanish artists) which had been illegally removed and found their way into private collections ...”

“... concealed inside an early Elizabethan ring which once belonged to Winston Churchill. It was Sir Philip Sidney who said (not with Anne in mind but her daughter), ‘she was a queen and therefore beautiful,’ and much diplomatic comment on her exquisite good looks can be dismissed along with the misattributed portraits. There seems little doubt that she had ...”

“... be, Lawrence none the less succeeded, as we know, in exciting many of his readers. One of them was Philip Larkin, who always liked and admired Lawrence, considering him a criterion for the literary ‘non-bogus’. But Lawrence would not at all have cared for Larkin’s own use of the pornographic, in its higher or its lower manifestations. For Larkin, like ...”

“... As midwife to this book (its bibliographical history is tangled – parts are translated from the French, parts reconstructed, parts assembled from interviews) Marina Warner has done a great service. Carrington, like Denton Welch (both painters as well as writers) created a world coloured by an invalid’s intensity of feeling. Once tasted, its flavour is not ...”

“... belief. This is the second note very often struck by alienated Americans writing about America. Philip Roth in 1961: The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of ...”

“... Malice aside, Procopius was a shrewd judge of character. Justinian’s energies were demonic. Like Philip II of Spain a millennium later, he was a man who barely slept, whose entire being was focused, as if by unholy compulsion, on mastering every detail of every problem, however consequential, however trivial, a man who couldn’t refrain from personal ...”

“... from the Poetry Editor at Faber, Craig Raine. There’s more Martianism in another Faber debut, Philip Gross’s The Ice Factory. Clogged webs are slack-strung tennis nets; convulvulus, frail horn gramophones for bees – the opening lines assert, pulling out all the stops, but also requiring too much of that comma (which stands in for a plural verb but ...”

“... the fringes of science before they became officially credible. At the end of the 18th century, the French Academy of Sciences said with impeccable Gallic logic that, as there were no rocks in the sky, no rocks could fall from the sky. In 1803, more than two thousand meteorites fell on a village in Normandy – after that, and an investigation by the scientist ...”

“... to a palace like Blenheim, had been a conspectus of English life since the Middle Ages. Unlike the French, English landowners mostly liked to be in the country. As employers, farmers, improvers and on occasion wreckers, they were familiar presences on their estates. In the 18th century the country house, often with a landscaped garden, reached its ...”

“... and we can’t wait to get to know you.’And take you for every penny we can.7 July. Run into Philip and Kersti French in M&S with Philip bent tight over his trolley and using it as a walker. I ask him how he is. ‘Dreadful’. ‘Anything specific?’ ‘Knees. Legs. Lungs. Kidneys ...”

“... in two distinctive ways. Her narrative starts with one foreign fleet in the English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling ...”

“... famous shroud. He had by this time already made a martial name for himself, and in 1346, after the French defeat at Crécy (a battle he was lucky to miss), he was taken into the royal council of King Philip VI. With the next king, John II, who ascended the French throne in 1350, he came to ...”

“... misleading collage. It builds first on the exaggerated respect paid to Chinese institutions by the French Enlightenment in the 18th century, and is then overlaid by the risible images of China’s feeble response to Western imperialism in the 19th century, and now in the 20th century by the figure of that extraordinary half-god, half-demon, Mao Zedong. Since ...”

“... Elizabeth would be placed on the English throne as a puppet sovereign, to be betrothed to a French or Spanish royal suitor and facilitate England’s re-Catholicisation. Fraser admitted to several known unknowns in her counterfactual history, but was certain that ‘the young Elizabeth Stuart would have made an excellent queen, with her ...”