“... but the lairds Traill and Burroughs and the factor Scarth. In the ‘England and France’ chapter of his extended autobiography, Muir, explaining his differences with the Marxist poets of the Thirties, allows that they ‘knew a great deal about the present (which we did not)’. And he ends the chapter staying briefly on Damsay and harking ...”

“... Samuel Johnson also was worrying that English speakers were starting ‘to babble a dialect of France’. Incorporation of foreign words into a language can be a sign of its lack of vocabulary (Cicero thought Latin needed to borrow from Greek), of its commitment to cosmopolitanism (Schleiermacher advanced a version of this argument), or just a matter of ...”

“... protests were overshadowed by those across the Channel and on the other side of the Atlantic (in France and America they occupied great universities: here, students took over colleges of art). The FBI put Ayers and Dohrn at the top of its ‘most wanted’ lists; in Germany, the violent actions, trials and suicides of the RAF leaders dominated and defined ...”

“... Victor Considerant as a solution to the social and economic instabilities of post-revolutionary France: a settlement house or estate for 1620 people organised around a street gallery that ran the full length of the second floor. This public thoroughfare was the only way to get from one domestic interior to another, or to gain access to an array of ...”

“... charismatic, if vain and irascible author, the text also sheds tantalising light on 12th-century France. Most of its details can be corroborated by other sources, so its veracity is hard to challenge. Heloise, despite her avowed lack of vocation, soon became abbess of her own monastery. Abelard has nothing but praise for his former wife (mutual monastic vows ...”

“... similarities from zone to zone, and that we can use one fear to illuminate another. In this novel David is a white American of uncertain sexual allegiance, more or less engaged to a girl called Hella. David falls in love with Giovanni, a barman in a gay bar in Paris. This love is vivid, captivating, the real coup de ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... and they form the main part of quite a different selection, Lettres d’ Amérique, published in France in 1984. Broadly speaking, they fall into the following categories: Gripping social correspondence of the ‘Thank you for your letter,’ ‘the weather is gorgeous,’ ‘Ivan must be a big boy now,’ ‘love to the doggies’ kind. Personal or legal ...”

“... home and sit under the staircase. And his conclusion is consistent with that scathingly drawn by David Owen: ‘the Royal Family, central government and local government politicians, the admirals, generals and air marshals and senior administrators all survive. But millions of others lose their lives. Money is to be spent on Sub-Regional Headquarters; the ...”

“... Waterloo. One of the most fascinating parts of these two volumes is the journey Farington made to France in 1802 at the time of the Treaty of Amiens. The brief cessation of hostilities between England and France provided an opportunity for English artists to visit Paris to see what French artists had been up to since the ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... in a brand-new, sharp-focus print at the National Film Theatre and the Screen on the Hill, was a David O. Selznick film, ‘a picturisation’ as the title credits have it, of a very successful novel. ‘We bought Rebecca,’ Selznick wrote in a memo objecting strenuously to a first draft of the screenplay, ‘and we intend to make Rebecca.’ That was the ...”

“... Too late, David Copperfield realises that he has married an imbecile: Dora is good-looking and affectionate, but she’s useless with a cookery book and incapable of managing servants. She calls her husband ‘Doady’ and begs him to accept that she can never be more to him than a ‘child-wife’. Worst of all, she will never be able to appreciate his genius ...”

“... quarrel about immigration was focused on asylum seekers, as Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and France were locked in a battle of conscience over their duties as signatory states to the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. There were ‘floods’ of asylum seekers; they would require housing, healthcare, education and more. Most countries fell ...”