“... 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 ...”

“... the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was ...”

“... 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 In an age like ours, when few doctors read papers more than ten years old, and a five-year-old textbook is obsolete, the longevity of Greek medicine is astounding.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 ...”

“... is acknowledged in Fagles’s rendering, and also in the (outstandingly helpful) introduction by Bernard Knox, who speaks of the analogy of the lion ‘going his own barbaric way’ as one in which Achilles is seen as ‘the lower extreme of Aristotle’s alternatives – a beast’. The perception is here Apollo’s, not Homer’s, and is that of a Trojan ...”

“... especial vehemence against the Armenians. Its wealthy hero, Gabriel Bragadian, has returned from Paris to his native village of Yoghonoluk and slides into his dead father’s role as informal leader of his own and the neighbouring Armenian villages; he isn’t a separatist or sectarian but a loyal, indeed patriotic citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which has ...”

“... intended to create a state for Jews in a province that was more than 90 per cent Arab. At the Paris peace talks in 1919, a French delegate let slip that France would not oppose a Jewish ‘state’ in Palestine. Weizmann cautioned him. He explained: ‘We ourselves had been very careful not to use this term.’ In July 1920, while the Allies were still ...”

“... England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new ...”

“... red in the West and South-East, deep post-Communist red in the Centre and North-East. Compare Paris, a permanent fief of the Right; Rome, where Fini’s ex-Fascists are the largest party; or even London, where Ken Livingstone will never sweep Westminster or Kensington. Bismarck’s nightmare has come true. Berlin is going to be the most left-wing capital ...”

“... and reluctantly, the articles of impeachment against Nixon. Her boss at the time had been Bernard Nussbaum, one of many ambitious attorneys to get a head start from that investigation. Mr Nussbaum had just been forced to resign as White House counsel, for his apparent role in muddying the inquiry into the death of Vince Foster. Thus, while a ...”

“... are just camping out in scarcely-differentiated space. By the time we get to 17th-century Paris, the bourgeois house has four or five floors and an internal courtyard. Cooking has been separated out, and there is greater distinction between servants, tenants and the main family. There may have been panelling and frescoes in the residences of the ...”

“... I don’t see why it can’t be both. It does helpfully identify a number of stars in the recent Paris sky, so that Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Blanchot, Greimas and others are all placed in a kind of orbit around Barthes. Lavers is not much taken with what she sees as the temporary mindlessness of Barthes’s next-to-last ...”

“... Lagonda with the young Alan Clark). In Tuscany, on the first of these jaunts, he met Bernard Berenson, art collector and maestro of highly paid authentication. Berenson became an intimate friend, and their correspondence over the years – witty and very frank – is one of Sisman’s richest sources. But, unexpectedly, Sisman himself comes ...”