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“... for a calculating machine. He later became a corresponding member of the Académie Royale in Paris and first president of the Societät der Wissenschaften in Berlin, and when he obtained salaried work at the Hanoverian court at the age of 30, he took it for granted that he would continue to pursue his vocation as a universal intellectual and perpetual ...”

“... down. Yours, James Prendergast.’ He puts this into an envelope addressed ‘Mr Georges Bidault, Paris, France’, and pops it in the post. A few days later (Benny now departed), there is a knock at the door. My father, alone in the flat, opens the door. A Special Branch officer asks him if he is James Prendergast and if he wrote the letter the officer shows ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... United States, sped through the icy North Atlantic while dining as if in the finest restaurant in Paris. Lords of the universe. Within a few hours most were dead. We know a great deal about the glitterati on the doomed liner and the stories are both absurdly delicious and irresistibly sad. Mahala Douglas, wife of the Quaker Oats heir, sat at the table where ...”

“... in Other Passports. They are all formal verse and one of them, ‘To Pete Atkin: Letter from Paris’, was his initial attempt at ottava rima, the stanza chosen later for his extended verse diaries. In a letter slightly earlier than the one to Atkin, he sets out what by then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this ...”

“... in her essay, ‘Am I a Snob?’ In the discussion session which followed Williams’s paper, Bernard Sharratt remarked that although the Godwin circle had been repressed it nonetheless had had an influence on Hazlitt, whose critique of Malthus and Ricardo suggested an ‘alternative direction’ that could have been developed further. The Pre-Raphaelites ...”

“... remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and copy ...”

“... press lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice. For short-term tactical ...”

“... potent contempt than in Houellebecq’s letter on his mother in Public Enemies, an exchange with Bernard-Henri Lévy? He never felt greater disgust for this ‘absolutely self-centred creature’, he says, than when she told him, on one of perhaps 15 encounters between mother and son, that his former nanny had asked after him: ‘She thought it was ...”

“... his paragraph on Iran to mock ‘fashionable’ supporters of the Islamist upsurge in London and Paris, but didn’t bring up the Anglo-American coup against Mossadegh in 1953 or the American mollycoddling of the shah. He wrote about the collaboration between the Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq and the Saudi Islamists, but left out the middleman in the ...”

“... a family drama – a struggle between herself and Christabel (now running the WSPU from exile in Paris) over the movement’s strategy and their mother’s soul. She disliked the turn away from popular protest towards arson and property damage; she also wanted the WSPU to ally with Labour, as – albeit mostly for strategic reasons – the constitutionalist ...”

“... was not like the Cultural Revolution in China, nor comparable to the violence on the streets of Paris or in German universities in and around that particular year. But having gradually reduced the terms of his comparison, he then escalates it vertiginously: ‘It was an intellectual rather than a street revolution that dismantled the old literary ...”

“... Committee for Medical and Psychological Emergencies that Fassin and Rechtman were attending in Paris. (The founding of this body in 1997 itself attests to the new public linking of inner and outer wounds.) In the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers there was much talk of mass trauma, presented as an affirmation of a common humanity as if in parallel ...”

“... years. Hippocrates was translated into Latin. (The great modern edition appeared in 19th-century Paris.) In an age like ours, when few doctors read papers more than ten years old, and a five-year-old textbook is obsolete, the longevity of Greek medicine is astounding. Yet Chinese medicine did not become global medicine and it is outside Porter’s brief to ...”

“... scandalous omission of any of Christina Rossetti’s poems from the Longman anthology edited by Bernard Richards. I merely puzzle over the fact that Browning’s ‘Caliban upon Setebos,’ only five lines shorter than ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, is in the anthology but doesn’t make a fifth in the list.) Clough’s magnificent tragi-comedy, whose ...”