“... the abominable to the merely unsavoury.In the case of Holocaust denial – the crime for which David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from returning to Austria – the fear of contagion in some countries is based on rational horror instructed by recent experience. That is the argument for making an exception to the belief that the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... quickened the pace of European integration, including plans for a single currency. The French in particular saw the need to ensure that a bigger and more powerful Germany was embedded in European institutions so that it would be subject to the influence of others, above all the French themselves. François ...”

“... teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.’ Bertrand Russell recalled in his autobiography that he ‘falsely supposed’ all Cantor’s ‘arguments to be fallacious’, only later realising that ‘all ...”

“... version of what we call Storm Shadow, the air-launched cruise missile used by the RAF (the French call it Scalp). The Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation signed by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy at their summit on 2 November specifically anticipates Anglo-...”

“... in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most ...”

“... of which he is unlikely to have been aware, was with the stethoscope, first described by the French physician (and flautist) René Laënnec in De l’auscultation médiate (1819). Auscultation is the action of intent listening, or hearkening. Harry Caul doesn’t begin to hearken to the recording he has made of the conversation in Union Square until his ...”

“... Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by Eisenhower to become his chief of Intelligence; and the formidable Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Godfrey, and his assistant Ian Fleming. Their meetings must ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”

“... final of the first rugby union world cup, a correspondent for Libération caught the mood in the French changing room. ‘The players enter without a word … A few coughs, the sound of shoes and bags dropped on the floor. Almost immediately the rasping sound of adhesive tape torn from spools. It will never stop. The strapping of ears and limbs.’ Slowly ...”

“... the Great and the Great Elector. Nazism was aberration, not culmination, the evil fruit of French Jacobin madness and mass politics, not Prussian order and moderation. The fact that this argument was consistent with Fifties’ theories about totalitarianism was an added bonus. It became possible to blame Hitler on Robespierre or Rousseau’s General ...”

“... The prisoners held in the USSR ‘came home’ in 1955. By the summer of 1957 the British and French had closed down their prisons in Werl and Wittlich; the Americans released the last of their war criminals from Landsberg in May 1958. Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach remained in Spandau, under joint four-power auspices, and a few ...”

“... jokes were excellent, his good humour seemingly unsinkable and, single-handedly, he rejuvenated French comedy, retaining a framework of farce and weaving traditional plots, satire and spectacle into a fully integrated form of comic theatre. All this suggests a confident Molière, well equipped to handle the controversy he appears to have courted. Purists ...”

“... a sign of our loss of authentic memory, as it was for Pierre Nora in his monumental survey of the French construction of a national past, Les Lieux de mémoire. If we accept that there is no architecturally embodied identity of a nation or people, that our current historical existence is not vitally wrapped up in relics of an imagined past except as ...”