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“... the Calvinist International had ceased to exist. It had still been a reality when James I and the French Huguenots had sent theologians to the Synod of Dort in 1618. But Charles I helped Louis XIII to suppress the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and Archbishop Laud severed links with Continental Calvinists. Even after his fall, wars between Puritan England and ...”

“... Mr Scruton’s nerve fails him a little. He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a work of pure dogmatic. De ...”

“... land drawn around London with seeming foresight in the 1930s. Because of such planners as Patrick Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin, who believed the countryside was virtuous and cities should be contained, Londoners like me can still relish and appropriate scenes that New Yorkers, Angelenos and even Parisians, Romans and Milanese must go further to ...”

“... Gaelic League and later President of Eire, was a man who knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew as well as French, German and English, and also liked to hunt; but he spoke Irish, in defiance of the assumption that no gentleman could or would do so. To establish solidarity with the people it might be essential to eliminate such assumptions. It became a matter of ...”

“... an entirely new road system, based on an inner ring road, at that point a novelty in the UK. Patrick Abercrombie, then Britain’s most energetic town planner, drew up the 1946 Clyde Valley Regional Plan, which like his earlier scheme for Greater London envisioned that slum-dwellers would be moved out of the city into new towns, and the new low-density ...”

“... I was writing a novel called Downriver and walking, in dialogue, with the cultural historian Patrick Wright, who lived close to me in Hackney. We explored the territory together: the Bow Quarter development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet ...”

“... A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow ...”

“... cotton wool. The act was as intimate and warm as the act of sex.’ In 1981, in a letter to his French translator, Alain Delahaye, McGahern describes laying out the brother of a neighbour in the company of a chemist from Dublin who kept adjusting the mouth: ‘I knew this pursuit of perfection could go on all night. The murmurs outside the door were ...”

“... the language used to describe a castrato singing has its own luscious, plaintive sound. The French soprano Emma Calvé wrote in her autobiography about hearing the castrato Domenico Mustafà in 1891: ‘He had an exquisite high tenor voice, truly angelic, neither masculine nor yet feminine in type – deep, subtle, poignant in its vibrant intensity ...”

“... certainty for consumers in America and, increasingly, around the world. There are translations in French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish and Swedish. Berlusconi has just made Parker a Commendatore of the Ordine al Merito, and, after Mitterrand gave Parker a knighthood in the Ordre National du Mérite in 1993, Chirac bettered it in 1999 with a knighthood ...”

“... canal-digging, but did not mind the thought of them working in chains in the antipodes. Similarly French and Spanish convicts were got decently out of sight by being sent to pull an oar in the galleys; and lately men and women disliked by the Argentine Government were being turned into still more unobtrusive desaparecidos. It remained to find a suitable ...”

“... Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger later attended Stonyhurst College; the Claimant was barely literate. The best that could be said for him was that he waggled his eyebrows in a way that reminded his ...”

“... have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most to say about domestic policy: the whole of Roosevelt’s foreign policy ...”

“... the dying days of the Ancien Régime. Jane’s sailor-brother Captain Frank Austen reports in the Patrick O’Brian style on the high point of his naval career when, off St Domingo on 6 February 1806, his ship Canopus gave a French three-decker ‘a tickling which knocked all his sticks away’. Where there’s insufficient ...”

“... three liveried servants, a Malay he had brought back from the Endeavour voyage, a gardener, a French chef and two French horn players. A new set of Wedgwood Queen’s Ware china was packed for onshore entertainment.During the three years of the Endeavour’s voyage, planting the flag and tagging the plants ...”