“... money would be quite correct and yet miss the special character of its mental state. In Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Belgium, but above all in Germany, the mighty realms of politics, diplomacy, commerce and public administration have been condensed into tiny and arbitrary numerical quantities: to be precise, tenths of a percentage ...”

“... 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 began to follow the sport, and the white-coated gatekeepers often let me in without a ticket once the first race was underway. Ancient names such as Lord Howard de Walden, exotic ones such as the Aga ...”

“... for other cultures. He was also fluent in French, and made lengthy and mysterious journeys to France. These were supposedly undertaken for the good of his health, yet it is suspected that, in this and other instances, he was acting as a spy. Although not lacking in bravery, he never captured the main prize – a Manila galleon perhaps – so never got ...”

“... Both sons were educated at Rugby, but whereas Austen went on to Cambridge and grand tours of France and Germany, Neville on leaving school ‘took courses in applied science at Mason College’. It was his father’s decision that sent Neville on his first commercial venture, to the Caribbean island of Andros, where he spent seven years of appalling ...”

“... by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had high hopes that he would manage its postcolonial interests in the Maghreb – he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been on the throne a little more than two years when Moumen Diouri, a revolutionary firebrand in ...”

“... for motion, however, is too strong. Even when his wife and daughter were satisfactorily dumped in France, even when he was between affairs, even when he had given up his quarrels with the dean and chapter at York, he seemed perpetually compelled to quit Shandy Hall. Sometimes it is health trips of increasingly unhopeful prognosis; sometimes it is the ...”

“... Nelly’s not very wonderful career on the stage came to an end at this period, but her fortunes rose. By the age of 21 she owned a fine four-storey house near Mornington Crescent. Tomalin thinks it must have been bought by Dickens. ‘In eighteen months, the situation of the Ternan family had been transformed from uncertainty to something approaching ...”

“... a social élite to fulfil its predetermined social role’. Like Queller, they want to tear the rose-tinted spectacles from the nose of the conventional wisdom, and present Renaissance education as the inculcation not of liberal values but of a ‘safe conformity’ and a ‘docile attitude towards authority’. The authors associate the view they reject ...”

“... So that, for example, I could write plays very quickly.’ He began to follow a routine: he rose early, worked, ate and rested at set times before going to bed at nine. Around this time, he estimated that he had enough material for forty plays. The prediction turned out to be remarkably accurate, even if the works to come were mostly not those he’d ...”

“... Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ‘couching’ (i.e. stuffing the cataract away within the eyeball) serve the needs of the ...”

“... prescriptions for antidepressants jumped from 2.5 million to 4.7 million between 1980 and 1989. In France, the number rose sevenfold between 1970 and 1996, and no fewer than 14 million prescriptions were recorded in 1994. The World Health Organisation predicts that depression will soon become the second largest public health ...”

“... cities with shells of poison gas, a fetching compound of arsenic and henbane. After the war, France and Germany signed the Strasburg Agreement of 1675, the first treaty to ban the use of chemical weapons. Habsburg hegemony was not all minuets and onion domes (the sign that a parish had returned to Rome). Rady’s index lists 42 Habsburg wars as against ...”

“... paintings, group portraits in council chambers – were either unavailable or compromised. Even in France, where masterpieces of exhibition painting (like those by Géricault, Delacroix and Courbet) had been produced well into the 19th century, it was the room pictures of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, not the exhibition pictures of the Salon ...”

“... betray:We are born with the deadSee, they return, and bring us with them.The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew treeAre of equal duration. A people without historyIs not redeemed from time, for history is a patternOf timeless moments. So, while the light failsOn a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapelHistory is now and England.Seen from ...”

“... came from, were made more difficult to overlook by Assouline’s biography, which was published in France in 1996. Assouline had the estate’s support, he says delicately, ‘for the duration of my research’ (it was later withdrawn), and he gave ‘the most sensitive files’, as Benoît Peeters puts it, the methodical combing ‘that everyone had been ...”