“... of what was surveyed on black and white television with an Olympian commentary by Clive Graham and Peter O’Sullevan. ‘Under starter’s orders,’ the public address system boomed. A hush fell over the distant stands. ‘They’re off.’ As the thunder of the hoofs receded, the roar of the punters rose. The Red Cross van lumbered slowly in pursuit. I ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a Protestant. But there was always my Uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic supporter – not like my brothers, but a real Celtic supporter, the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle ...”

“... Forty years ago​ , Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding ...”

“... From 1940 onwards Camus was effectively ‘exiled’ from Algeria, having left for metropolitan France and become cut off from North Africa by the war. (Henceforth, apart from occasional visits, Algeria would remain a distant prospect, on which he gazed with ever greater dismay.) By 1943 he was living in Paris and working for Gallimard. In the last five ...”

“... of Saint-Just. The two editors of the volume concentrate on the peasantry in the South of France. Although national politics could intrude on the village, usually as a result of the activities of royalist agents, the Revolution tended to be seen mainly in local terms. Those who had profited from it in ways that offended traditional ideas about what ...”

“... kindly paterfamilias with twinkling eyes – disintegrated; his friends were appalled. Slater and Peter Ackroyd, looking at the same letters and bills of fare, the same reminiscences of children and admirers, aren’t convinced Dickens ever slept with Nelly Ternan, but Tomalin’s Dickens is so virile (those ten children): of course he did. We know little ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed Jenkins and Tony Crosland – ‘more from inertia and indifference than conviction’ – in their move to set up a rival Democratic Socialist Party. It was thus the war which made Healey ...”

“... the Spanish Court in the 17th century any more than Ingres’s can from conditions in 19th-century France. The age makes a contribution, and portrait painters may do so too – I imagine that the way a late 19th-century heiress sat on a sofa was not uninfluenced by Boldini or Sargent – but even the great flatterers had to have something to build ...”

“... months, ‘a period exactly framed by the two mescaline overdoses’. Later: ‘I was living in France at the time of the Hearst kidnapping. But my relation to Ling was still close enough that she could use me as a reference in renting the apartment where they had Patti tied up in a closet.’ Great! The poetry contained here – Rats, if we are ...”

“... Adam Smith, found that Tory Edinburgh could be uncharitable to a man who had visited revolutionary France in its dawn, and who had incautiously cited Condorcet with a respect that he came to rue. The lesson he drew was that keeping his head down was the price of keeping the faith. Preeminently a man whose ‘disciples were among his best works’, as Sir James ...”

“... within his emerging reflections on the micro-physics of power. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1973-74 he dissociated the book from the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1960s, in order to give the anti-psychiatric impulse greater historical depth. It was now Charcot, not even mentioned in History of Madness, who unwittingly inaugurated the age of ...”

“... How​ does a comic writer describe a world that has stopped being funny? What to say when the system you satirise is swept away, when parts of the population are killed, when the survivors become refugees, drifting away en masse but it’s unclear where to? Teffi was faced with these questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war ...”