“... He trained in mathematics and psychology and now runs a laboratory at the Collège de France outside Paris. His message is that there has been enormous progress. With a little ingenuity, he claims, consciousness can now be studied routinely: we have several ‘signatures’ of conscious thought in the activity of the brain, and a theory, descended ...”

“... influence of the magically lit rooms filled with Du Sommerard’s bric à brac was very great in France, especially when the collection was opened to the general public in the 1830s, Wainwright claims that it ‘was not particularly strong in England, for by the time he created them such interiors were not unusual there. Indeed French artists of the stature ...”

“... them a strategic frontier. Second, in return for this concession, an alliance was formed to defend France against future German aggression. But this alliance depended on American participation. When the US Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty on 19 March 1920, protection for France fell away. Moreover, the effectiveness of ...”

“... The disenchantment of the Portland Whigs owed much to Burke’s critique of the revolution in France and unhappiness with Fox’s bien-pensant francophilia; and it is in this respect only that we can establish a link – however slender – between Burke and the Conservative Party. On the other hand, it was the Rockingham-Fox Whig grouping that Burke ...”

“... Henry’s 56 years on the throne. At the same time, by deposing John and inviting Prince Louis of France, soon to be Louis VIII, to assume the English throne, they were insisting that the king’s rule was conditional on good behaviour and the Great Council had the right to depose an unjust monarch. This menacing proviso too lurked in the background ...”

“... longer before I die – I fall to brooding about that devastating term of abuse of our times, the Peter Pan crow of complacency: Get a life. I am impressed and rather envious of those who use the phrase: that they can be so certain that they know what a life is, and so convinced that they have one. From the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it ...”

“... Air Ministry’s estimate of the size of the German bomber force in the west was much too high – Peter Gray Lucas refers to this as the ‘St Ives story’ (‘As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives’). But to get a better estimate it was necessary to know which aircraft belonged to which unit, which was difficult because the call-signs ...”

“... Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in this century that he had a French girlfriend, and French illegitimate daughter, has not altered the stuffy public image of Victorian Poet Laureate and sage of Rydal Mount. If anything can change this ...”

“... Ann Fleming wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1956, after she’d been to visit Diana Cooper in France. ‘Mr Gaitskell came to lunch and fell in love with Diana ... He had never seen cocktails with mint in them or a magnum of pink champagne. He was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper class were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow ...”

“... Brazil and the political status of the Golan Heights. They are prime movers of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough Whitlam’s Government in Australia, have put together a remarkably well-informed, coherent and readable survey of this vast ...”

“... the discipline, symmetry and Neoclassical cleanliness pervasive in the villa architecture of France, Germany and Austria after 1905. Their equals, emblems of a manner of life doomed by impending war, may be found in almost every bourgeois city-suburb of Europe. If these houses resonate at all, it is not for any special virtue of their own, but because ...”

“... who bounds through the traffic, down to his favoured gap in the rocks, before striking off towards France; leaving his tolerant companion, a girl (his daughter), sketching on the shingle shelf. I’ve seen this man before, on film, his own film, when the pace was beginning to flag, hurling himself fully clothed into the Scottish sea. He’ll swing outside a ...”

“... Work’ an international, even global affair were the materials it employed. Linen came from France and the Low Countries, silk often from the Near East or China, possibly even the Mongol Empire, and increasingly from elsewhere in Europe. (It wasn’t until the influx of French refugees after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 that the English ...”

“... National Gallery has a portrait of a heavily bearded Abraham; it also has an engraved version of Peter Lely’s portrait of him. (His beard made him a popular model; Van Dyck painted him as an apostle.) The 18th-century engraver George Vertue wrote a book about Thomas Simon; John Evelyn referred to him in Numismata, his discourse on medals, seals and ...”

“... lives? What can they tell their children? The answer, according to the interviews carried out by Peter Sichrovsky, would appear to be nothing. Again and again, the respondents in Strangers in their Own Land describe the impossibility of talking to their parents; in some cases they know nothing at all of their parents’ lives before 1945. These are the ...”