“... and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding ...”

“... far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and intelligence system. The detonation of British and French nuclear weapons on Pacific atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as ...”

“... the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading relations. The ...”

“... was the backdrop to Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, which appeared in French in 1951 and can be said to have created today’s Western image of the shaman. According to Eliade, shamans were neither tricksters nor schizophrenics but practitioners of the original, ‘archaic’ religion of prehistory, survivals from an era when ...”

“... to the William Dunn School of Pathology, and requested space, to work on tissue culture, from Howard Florey. He was allowed in, and assisted, in a minor way, in the main project of that laboratory, penicillin. He had set out on the path to research that matters. In so doing, he stands out among the zoologists who graduated from Goodrich’s school. Those ...”

“... on a rosy apocalyptic glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith ...”

“... at Vichy is a real-time, one-act play about a group of arrested Jews in the waiting-room of a French police station in 1942. It has been criticised for both the speechifying and the over-neat plotting of its closing section (an aristocratic gentile arrested by mistake hands on his pass to one of the other prisoners, who escapes). Critics have tended to ...”

“... family is much older: a manuscript dated to the 1440s records it as a local tradition. In 1533 a French poet called Maurice Scève, a disciple of Petrarch, announced that he had discovered Laura’s tomb in Avignon. It was unmarked but allegedly contained a casket in which were found a handwritten sonnet in the style of Petrarch (albeit on an off-day) and a ...”

“... the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The children were taught the sins of ...”

“... II not died without producing an heir, ‘Scotland,’ Mackay concedes, ‘might have become a French appanage.’ Despite all this In My End Is My Beginning prefers to suggest that a misunderstood proto-liberalism was more responsible for the Queen’s problems at home than her devout Francophilia, her unswerving Catholicism and her disastrous marital ...”

“... in that sense. The Scandinavians and the Dutch have more in common with us than they have with the French and the Italians. The Germans have more in common with us than they do with the Italians. The Italians have more in common with the French than with the Scandinavians, and so on. But all of us have some things in ...”

“... once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure.’17 February. Catch part of BBC2’s celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first ...”

“... the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no settler planned to inhabit. The strength and ...”

“... Fry, who, with Clive Bell, ‘made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde’: for them ‘any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid’ was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another essay, Hughes dwells on Howard Hodgkin’s distinguished family ...”

“... Portrait Gallery has a fine snapshot (taken by Colin Matthew) of the architectural historian Howard Colvin in the ruins of Godstow Abbey: spectacles pushed up on his forehead, camera dangling from one hand, he looks down intently as he makes a neat entry in the notebook he has just fished from his pocket. I have always been impressed by those academics ...”