“... performance. I was surprised but delighted to find that J.I.M. Stewart’s last novel, A Villa in France, was a good deal more than the rather off-beat comedy of manners which it initially promised to be. An Open Prison reads at first like a latecomer to the minor genre of the public-school story, with references both to Greyfriars and to Stalky which show ...”

“... a quarter-century after the Civil War ended, writes about the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer, part of France’s foul Gulag archipelago into which half a million soldiers and refugees from the defeated Republic were herded – Soler’s grandfather among them. The most memorable of these extracts or sketches are about time – the draining of one kind of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of runs. In the tradition of General MacArthur, David Gower has announced his return. I hope he succeeds ...”

“... but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction. The first three books each provided a snapshot of a particular point in Patrick’s life: his miserable, abused childhood in Provence in Never Mind (1992); his miserable, heroin-addicted twenties in Bad ...”

“... two other biographies in English already exist: Iain Hamilton’s Koestler: A Biography (1982) and David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). But Scammell has little time for either work. His bibliography dismisses Hamilton’s book as ‘superficial and ill-researched’, and Cesarani’s (the one which attacked Koestler as a serial ...”

“... the Mansion House speech, that, like his colleagues, Ll.G. believed British aid to be essential if France was to survive a German attack. This is not a wholly satisfying explanation either of Lloyd George’s speech in July 1911 or of his silence three years later. Why should the despatch of a German gunboat to Agadir, and the failure of the German government ...”

“... concerted mouthing of Cold War platitudes which conservative politicians preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared they would become ‘other-directed’ conformists, incapable of the ...”

“... by the titles of the two recent books by Derrida, De l’esprit and Psyché, both published in France in 1987. Of Spirit reflects on whether this vocabulary can really be avoided, and it does so principally by asking whether Heidegger, whose intention in Being and Time was to avoid the notion of spirit, was successful in doing so. While this point may ...”

“... French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at ...”

“... final work came out in 1986. More local in topic, and limited in execution. The Identity of france has generally been treated as a charming but relatively slight coda to his achievement as a whole. In fact, this concluding project – on which Braudel embarked in his late seventies – was conceived on a colossal scale. The torso that survives, two ...”

“... be made use of in ways that are contextually effective, and surprisingly original. That is what David Piper contrived to do in a brilliant one-off war novel, Trial by Battle. It describes the experiences of a young officer, the reverse of professional, during the 1941 Malayan campaign between the British-Indian Army and the Japanese: the campaign which led ...”

“... And it has not only been comparatively small, it has also been relatively safe. Unlike Russia or France or Austria or Germany, there have been no pogroms, no show trials, no outbreaks of orchestrated anti-semitism, no final solutions. Ever since Anglo-Jewry’s return to Britain on the eve of the Restoration, its history has been one of sustained economic ...”

“... of enjoyment and sexuality evident in the church art of so many other countries, in Spain and France and Britain, and in the Buddhist East where I once saw a wayside shrine in the hills east of Kandy which imaged the afterlife as a thorn-tree up which sinners climbed for so many thousand years (the rates per sin were displayed in a cave temple ...”

“... delayed as long as possible. Hinzpeter strongly advised that Wilhelm travel – spend some time in France or even America, then live in England for a year. But the prince went off to study in Bonn, like his father and Coburg grandfather, where he joined a duelling fraternity, mixed with officers of the King’s Hussars stationed in the town, and found himself ...”