“... enough known that Napoleon’s victory over the Austrian army at Marengo on 14 June 1800 had a major effect on the history of the menu. The surprising haste of the engagement left the French commissariat far behind its commander, whose hunger had to be satisfied with what his cook had to hand: a scrawny chicken butchered with a sabre, some ...”

“... were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England ...”

“... a standard of living conspicuously above that of the working people whose welfare was their major concern. This ‘wearied and excited’ Beatrice’s ‘poor little brain’ particularly at the time of the move from Hampstead to Westminster when she had to decide on furniture for the new house. ‘It is somewhat softening to contend that you need ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... the bar, the tavern, the queue, the street. In The End of the Line, as in much of his later work, major historical forces appear only as incidental extras in narratives driven by individual wants and needs. Great public events ‘always seemed to have a way of coinciding with paltry, semi-private ones. History had a disconcerting habit of operating on several ...”

“... disappointingly, to be just a desire to have even more money. Buchan offers a fascinated sketch of John Law, who for five hundred days or so ‘ruled France more completely than its absolute monarchs’. During this period, in the early 18th century, he controlled the country’s foreign trade and its national debt, as well as about half of what is now the ...”

“... of the realist aesthetic. The appearance of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, however, forced a major change in the terms of the discussion. Godard, Rivette and even Rohmer (one of the staunchly conservative set) discerned – and praised – a decisive break with traditional narrative and ‘sequence-shot’ naturalism, with Rivette and Godard resurrecting ...”

“... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... have latched onto the issue. ‘Bioethicists are to ethics what whores are to sex,’ Richard John Neuhaus wrote in the conservative periodical First Things. Dan Callahan, a founder of the Hastings Center, told the New York Times: ‘This is a semi-scandalous situation for my field.’ The Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a press release ...”

“... in sum, is our culture’s chief pictorial repository for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the ...”

“... of duty and the hope that he could shield colleagues more successfully from within the system. John Heilbron called his biography of Planck The Dilemmas of an Upright Man. Stern takes the same line, gloomily but fairly recording Planck’s small victories and large surrenders. To conflicts of conscience was added personal tragedy. One son had been killed ...”

“... End, especially Oxford Street and its environs, into a retail centre that made urban shopping a major leisure activity for women. The rise of modern shopping opened the city streets to respectable women, and played a significant role in both feminism and consumer culture. Although the study of British retailing is, as she explains, a flourishing academic ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... This dogged admiration for the public sector is an important fact of British life and has major electoral consequences: the Conservative Party paid a heavy price for its alienation of the public sector and its professional employees, and the Labour Party seems set to do exactly the same. Equally dangerous are the Government’s assumptions about the ...”