“... was told by his uncle that his father was a courageous man who died in a duel. By the 1960s, as he rose through the ranks of King Idris’s army, other stories were doing the rounds. We flash back to a brutal, impromptu interview with an NCO, who informs him that he was fathered by an Allied pilot, a Corsican brought down over the desert by the Germans in ...”

“... and about the same number of objects from Africa and Oceania, which he was among the first in France to acquire. At one point or another he possessed no fewer than 53 paintings and 180 drawings by Seurat alone.A secret agent in plain view, Fénéon led multiple lives in the 1880s and 1890s. He worked at the War Ministry (of all places), and quickly ...”

“... This poem for Auden lovingly re-creates for him places around Grigson’s summer home in France; and readers of Notes from an Odd Country (1970) will not be surprised. France releases in Grigson moods of gratified expansiveness which mysteriously evade him as soon as he re-crosses the Channel. It can only be at his ...”

“... to render recent events across the Channel in high old style: ‘Shudder, ye representatives of France,/ Shudder with horror’ and ‘O prodigality of eloquent anger!’ and so forth. Coleridge was ambivalent about Robespierre, as many British progressives were, but Southey was altogether more robust, reportedly exclaiming when he heard news of ...”

“... a couple of majors and became the number one golfer in the world. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. Then came the London Olympics, about which there was a lot of national grumbling, until they started. Britain ended up third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin ...”

“... or Mr Jones. Pinkie is strictly for the book. When the famous record to which the heart-broken Rose listens has stopped playing, he vanishes into limbo. Greene was less than ingenuous when he commented, in the second instalment of his autobiography, Ways of Escape, that he regretted calling the book an ‘entertainment’, and planning it on the lines of a ...”

“... father; there is a Saxon variant of Father Christmas called Knecht Rupert). The cuisine of Saxony (rose-hip and onion soup, goose with treacle sauce, Kesselfleisch – the ears, nose and neck fat of the pig boiled with peppermint) seems too recherché to have been made up for the purpose, and is unlikely to have been included in the collected works of ...”

“... came and the country panicked, its president fled the bunker and went on a tour of inspection to France and Britain. The floodwaters have now receded in many parts of the country, leaving 20 million people homeless. The province of Sind, however, is still under threat and 800,000 people are marooned without food. Aid agencies estimate the bail-out costs for ...”

“... moved but not overwrought at the fate of those who died at Pompeii, with the sinking of the Mary Rose, during the San Francisco earthquake and at the collapse of the Tay Bridge. We respond much more uneasily to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Estonia and the Marchioness. Lives cut short are less poignant once, to paraphrase Beckett, they ...”

“... take time out to secure the principles of statistics and probability for their work. Steven Rose, criticising Eysenck’s egregious application of techniques of statistical correlation in his work on IQ and race, has said that ‘Eysenck seeks to correlate IQ scores with EEG patterns almost in the manner of a 19th-century phrenologist.’ ‘The ...”

“... rebel was to arts a friend. The friend whose patronage probably led to an attack on Dryden in Rose Alley by hired thugs of Buckingham, the Zimri of the poem, was John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, a moderate royalist who did rather well out of the whole imbroglio. He was the author of An Essay upon Satire and An Essay upon Poetry, in the first of which ...”

“... Ahmed was the first to start rolling up his sleeves in readiness for the ritual washing. As we rose his mother said: ‘Why does Allah allow these things to happen? Where’s Allah to help us now?’ Ahmed replied quickly: ‘In the Qu’ran it says we will experience suffering and hardship till the end, we must all remember that.’ She did not look ...”

“... all the possessions, with the exception of Calais, that England (and Henry’s father) had won in France during the Hundred Years’ War. The result was that the country endured a series of political, military and commercial crises for which the king was entirely ill-equipped. York successfully outmanoeuvred Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s wife and principal ...”

“... Matisse, on the other hand, she admired and even thought of buying a seascape by him on a trip to France in 1923. (During this trip she cut Aldous Huxley and his wife, disgusted that they looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of Vogue.) When Duncan Grant had painted murals in Brunswick Square in 1912, he decorated Adrian Stephen’s drawing-room and ...”

“... the virtues of The Book History Reader is that it brings such continuities to light, pairing Mark Rose’s densely particularised history of copyright law with Foucault and Barthes on authorship, or Janice Radway’s lovingly detailed reconstruction of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s marketing strategies with Stanley Fish’s aggressively perverse model of ...”