“... granted Matilda any land or castles in England. He had refused to have her crowned, ignoring the French practice according to which the heir to the throne was always crowned during the father’s lifetime. Henry, still vigorous in his sixties, didn’t want to yield any authority, but this meant that Matilda had neither the power nor the status to make an ...”

“... her tone, changes the subject and discards her objectivity. Richard Cobb once wrote that a lot of French history could be walked, seen and above all heard in cafés and buses, and on park benches in Paris or Lyon. But few British, American or even Indian academics today write as if they have ever sat in a Delhi rickshaw or a café in Calcutta. They spend too ...”

“... at their most intense wherever there was no immediate boundary to the visual field. Westphal’s French counterpart, Legrand du Saulle, spoke instead of a ‘peur des espaces’, which struck not only in streets and squares, but on bridges and ferries, or when looking out of an upstairs window. Legrand’s patients included a Madame B., who found that she ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... version is only one of more than 250 different versions in other languages. German, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch and Japanese Wikipedia all have more than half a million entries each, with plenty of room to add. Xhosa Wikipedia currently has 110. Meanwhile, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had managed to increase the number of its entries from ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... From the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to Waterloo in 1815, Britain faced a recurrent threat of French invasion and the near-certainty of French aid for dissidents and conspirators at home: Jacobites before 1745; Jacobins after 1789. In the hundred years after 1750, Britain’s social fabric was tried and tormented by the ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... and style. ‘Israel’s Monarch’ seems slyly to emphasise that it is not, in fact, Jewish David with whom the poem will deal; and ‘Before Polygamy was made a Sin’ conveys just the right accentuation on polysyllabic gloating, and terse shocked monosyllable. There is on balance no very good reason to retain First Folio spelling for ordinary ...”

“... above all, was high on the list. The deliberations were really about Islam and its inroads into French secular culture. The ban will become law before the next school term; the difficult interim has been a time to test loyalties to the Republic, immigrant and beur loyalties for the most part, and television has been the place to do it. Many of the ...”

“... the country is full of grotesque throwbacks, and so does any comparison between the British and French real-estate markets. The French, having used the guillotine to good effect long ago, do not feel compelled to buy all-façade-and-no-comfort country houses, which could accordingly be bought for a song in places like ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... In​ 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented ...”