“... but the year has seen translations of Politics in the Ancient World flamboyantly launched in France and Italy, where he was fêted by academics and the popular press in a manner normally reserved for politicians or pop stars. This brings the number of translations of Politics in the Ancient World to about ten, including one in Catalan. Full-page, sober ...”

“... What saves these poems (for poetry) is the discreet use of spoken words (as in the fine sonnet ‘France’: ‘I would have liked us to have gone away’ ... ‘Some other day, my love. Some other day’), and the sharply focused detail – like the doctor’s wedding ring in ‘Second Opinion’. But it is the formal grace, now become habitual, and the ...”

“... of a century of cults and gurus, of sincerity and fraudulence, of hopes and disappointments, Peter Washington detects the faint sound of Blavatsky’s baboon having the last laugh. Washington presents his subject as the rise of the Western guru: in fact, charisma, faith, leader and follower, have never been absent from religion or from history. In the ...”

“... letters – the most famous containing Thorpe’s assurance that ‘Bunnies can (and will) go to France,’ Bunnies being his pet name for Scott – as well as bizarre accusations (Scott repeatedly claimed that Thorpe had stolen his national insurance card) and repeated efforts by the Liberal parliamentary party to get to the bottom of Scott’s increasingly ...”

“... institute in all of Great Britain, in contrast to the multiple training avenues available in France, Germany and the United States, and that the British Society suffers from a residual insularity and reluctance to forge alliances with the universities and other bodies in order to build a wider psychoanalytic culture. As Steiner points out, the ...”

“... and Olgivanna, Wright’s third and last wife, who had been one of Gurdjieff’s disciples in France, had, Gill writes, ‘learned much from her years of sitting at his feet in the feudal establishment that that fiercely mustachioed old tartar had created at Fontainebleau’. When the time came, she showed a sure and self-protective sense of the ...”

“... following year, he attended the Golden Fleece Salon, an exhibition of two hundred paintings from France, including works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir, Degas, Signac, Van Gogh, Pissarro and many others – the Nabis, the Pointillists and, especially significant for Malevich, the Fauves, including Matisse. However, it was not until 1910, when he first met ...”

“... after it was censored by the French authorities, he marvelled in a letter to Diderot that ‘it is France that persecutes philosophy! And it is the Scythians who show it favour!’ Over the next two decades, a number of Enlightenment thinkers – Diderot, Bentham, Herder – either travelled to St Petersburg or followed Voltaire in opening a philosophical ...”

“... on with them through successive changes of habitat – moving to the United States in 1945, to France in 1955, to Switzerland in 1957 – until 1972.The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers ...”

“... on the island of St Croix, then part of the Danish West Indies. The island had been bought from France in 1733 and its economy was founded on the sugar trade. A slave population of around twenty thousand laboured on the island’s plantations; there were between 1500 and 2000 white residents, including plantation owners, government ...”

“... Waugh struggles with the history of a wine firm and Mitford produces letters about life in France, at two guineas a time, for Randolph Churchill to use in America. Nevertheless, as early as 1946, Waugh is contemplating the purchase of Gormanston Castle in County Meath as his future seat, pulling out when he hears that a Butlin’s camp is to be setup ...”

“... Technologies, the big data firm set up by the PayPal co-founder and Republican Party funder Peter Thiel, and Faculty, a small artificial intelligence company previously employed by Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign.During the summer, I was surprised to stumble across the name Public First in a spreadsheet of Cabinet Office spending data. Public First is ...”

“... operating in 26 countries, supplying 265,000 megawatts of electricity. In some countries, notably France, Belgium and Switzerland, more than half the electricity used is supplied by nuclear power stations. Many millions of people are employed in building, operating and servicing the world’s nuclear stations. No one is going to wave an ...”

“... an emphatic personal credo. Soon afterwards, he decided to leave England for good and moved to France. Not surprisingly, this abrupt change led to a dramatic shift in his thinking about art. He was no longer confined within the small world of British taste, a world still dominated by Bloomsbury, on the one hand, and Herbert Read, on the other. He had ...”

“... past espionage is obscene partly because fact and fiction have merged: Blunt, Bill Haydon, Smiley, Peter Wright seem by now all at the same distance. This obsession with espionage is that of investigators, of unmaskers. Its motives even with regard to secrecy are complex. It is obvious that the need to unmask and then unmask again assorted Cambridge spies is ...”