“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”

“... do that, they’ll catch him.’ The narrator tells us later that before he went to France to fight he had ‘never shot at a bird or an animal in my life’ – so his first targets were humans. Sassoon’s attitude to blood sports, as to most other things, was not without its complexities. All I felt at that moment was extreme annoyance at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and poverty – which ruled out the ambitious modernising colonialisms of industrial America, France, England and the Netherlands – and to its strategic position in Spain’s armpit, at the mouth of the Mediterranean, which earned it for centuries the backing of London’s naval might. It collapsed fastest because of the bizarre longevity of 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lear, through Greene the plot of Winter’s Tale, Orsino alludes to him, Hamlet quotes him. In France, at least, the fashion lasted. The young Racine, at Port Royal, learned Heliodorus by heart; Mlle de Scudéry outprosed her model in Le Grand Cyrus, the pap of a whole generation. P.D. Huet, the first historian of the novel, summed it up in ...”