“... Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ‘couching’ (i.e. stuffing the cataract away within the eyeball) serve the needs of the ...”

“... prescriptions for antidepressants jumped from 2.5 million to 4.7 million between 1980 and 1989. In France, the number rose sevenfold between 1970 and 1996, and no fewer than 14 million prescriptions were recorded in 1994. The World Health Organisation predicts that depression will soon become the second largest public health ...”

“... paintings, group portraits in council chambers – were either unavailable or compromised. Even in France, where masterpieces of exhibition painting (like those by Géricault, Delacroix and Courbet) had been produced well into the 19th century, it was the room pictures of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, not the exhibition pictures of the Salon ...”

“... a social élite to fulfil its predetermined social role’. Like Queller, they want to tear the rose-tinted spectacles from the nose of the conventional wisdom, and present Renaissance education as the inculcation not of liberal values but of a ‘safe conformity’ and a ‘docile attitude towards authority’. The authors associate the view they reject ...”

“... came from, were made more difficult to overlook by Assouline’s biography, which was published in France in 1996. Assouline had the estate’s support, he says delicately, ‘for the duration of my research’ (it was later withdrawn), and he gave ‘the most sensitive files’, as Benoît Peeters puts it, the methodical combing ‘that everyone had been ...”

“... one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the department, upped sticks in 2009 to become global head of health for the consultants KPMG. This last move did have the advantage of giving an insight into what had actually been going on in Whitehall ...”

“... like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the 1890s the same transition was held to have ‘sullied’ his poetic inspiration and ‘buried’ it in ‘the dust ...”

“... had reached 130 million; between 1909 and 1929 the estimated revenue in the magazine market rose from 54 million dollars to 320 million dollars. Magazines in the 1920s were, as Woodhead puts it, ‘the most influential vehicle in creating dreams, establishing trends and swaying consumer opinion’ and the two women understood very well the need to ...”

“... stock market in October 1929, conservative governments were in office in the United States, France and Sweden, while there were social democratic governments in Britain and Germany. All, however, were more or less indistinguishably faithful to the economic orthodoxies of the period: a commitment to sound money – that is, the gold standard – and ...”

“... plummet, so that by mid-century her work was selling for around a fiftieth of its former value. In France, her achievements were quickly eclipsed by the avant-garde, who cringed at the animalier genre of painting in which she specialised; even in her beloved Fontainebleau, the bronze bull erected to her memory was melted down by the Nazis and never ...”

“... states reveals about the institutional capacities of particular states, especially Britain and France. In both instances, the historical development of welfare states, rather than the character, causes and implications of contemporary disputes, is the main subject. It may well be that the historical understanding thus arrived at will illuminate ...”

“... from America, starts writing poetry and joins the army, to die four years later in combat in France. It is a frantic and harassed life in many ways, but Wilson tells her story at just the right pace, with patience and clarity, though occasionally her irritation with Thomas’s self-indulgent and self-dramatising misery breaks through – ‘The image he ...”

“... the president of a country which has taken on the mantle of empire inherited from Britain and France and is determined to remain in the Middle East for reasons of oil and of geo-strategic and political advantage. There has been a great deal of talk about linkage, a word I find ugly and a concept I find ...”

“... His share was to be Gibraltar and French Morocco. Confidence became certainty after the fall of France, and at that point he announced Spain’s renunciation of neutrality in favour of non-belligerency, meanwhile providing German U-boats and crews with harbours and refuelling facilities that enabled them to extend their range to the north coast of ...”

“... directed to Mexico’s uneasy relationship with the outside world – he was Mexican Ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977. As a novelist, he explores the internal character of his country, in Where the air is clear, his first novel, originally published in 1958, in The Death of Artemio Cruz and in Terra Nostra. His novels feel their way along the paradoxes ...”