“... the Spanish Court in the 17th century any more than Ingres’s can from conditions in 19th-century France. The age makes a contribution, and portrait painters may do so too – I imagine that the way a late 19th-century heiress sat on a sofa was not uninfluenced by Boldini or Sargent – but even the great flatterers had to have something to build ...”

“... months, ‘a period exactly framed by the two mescaline overdoses’. Later: ‘I was living in France at the time of the Hearst kidnapping. But my relation to Ling was still close enough that she could use me as a reference in renting the apartment where they had Patti tied up in a closet.’ Great! The poetry contained here – Rats, if we are ...”

“... Adam Smith, found that Tory Edinburgh could be uncharitable to a man who had visited revolutionary France in its dawn, and who had incautiously cited Condorcet with a respect that he came to rue. The lesson he drew was that keeping his head down was the price of keeping the faith. Preeminently a man whose ‘disciples were among his best works’, as Sir James ...”

“... within his emerging reflections on the micro-physics of power. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1973-74 he dissociated the book from the anti-psychiatric movement of the 1960s, in order to give the anti-psychiatric impulse greater historical depth. It was now Charcot, not even mentioned in History of Madness, who unwittingly inaugurated the age of ...”

“... How​ does a comic writer describe a world that has stopped being funny? What to say when the system you satirise is swept away, when parts of the population are killed, when the survivors become refugees, drifting away en masse but it’s unclear where to? Teffi was faced with these questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war ...”

“... principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of ...”

“... of Parnell and Casement. Clever readers of a certain type may object that Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield made rods for their own backs, dug their own graves, committed various sins of hubris and all the rest of it. Milne himself takes an honest and open line in favour of the NUM’s all-out strategy for the defence of the coalfields and the ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... be avoided if one changes the question from an analytical one to a historical one. Six years ago, Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer’s The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America shifted attention away from the conditions of the Seventies to the possible origins of those conditions over the course of the 20th century.2 Douglas Ashford’s The ...”

“... in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with France had ground towards a costly and destructive stalemate and economic hardship had fuelled mass petitions and protests. The prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, had responded with draconian emergency measures, banning public meetings and prosecuting ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... terms, little less than there was thirty years ago. The essays on the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy and West Germany permit the conclusion that in all these countries the top 10 per cent earn about 30 per cent of all income earned, whereas the bottom 30 per cent earn a mere 10 per cent. What changes there have been have affected, above ...”

“... and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period’. (This wasn’t hyperbole, since there are more than two thousand named characters in the Comédie ...”

“... was what businessmen call ‘over-capacity’. Large firms like GEC in Britain, Aérospatiale in France and Messerschmitt in Germany, were licking their lips at the juicy technology and skilled workers waiting to be gobbled up from Yeovil. The prospect seemed familiar. The company would go into receivership. The banks would move in and flog off the assets to ...”