“... 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 ...”

“... international legitimacy and a potentially invaluable ally against England’s traditional enemy, France. For the 16-year-old Catherine, by contrast, marriage to the Prince of Wales in November 1501 must have seemed like a parachute descent to an alien and unappealing planet. She spoke not a word of English, and both she and her entourage found English ...”

“... legend.’ She also has a mesmeric smile, devouring eyes, a cloud of fair hair and ‘a bosom that rose and fell in a kind of sigh’. It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the ...”

“... Yet his arguments for dividing political power hit home in America, and as the United States rose to prominence, its Montesquieuan model proved attractive to the Latin American countries in its sphere of influence. Britain and France took a different path. They repudiated Montesquieu and concentrated power in a single ...”

“... with the past.Lee was an English writer who wrote at a sceptical distance from England. Born in France in 1856, she spent her early years shifting around on the Continent with a domineering mother and ineffectual father. Eventually the family settled in Florence, largely because Lee’s half-brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, was struck by paralysis in ...”

“... detested stepfather. He learnt French as a boy through periods when his mother lived in Jersey and France; adored and attended the theatre from an early age; went to school in Greenwich, may have been a medical student, and at 20 was a radical and a convinced atheist with Shelley as his idol. Lewes actually wrote a biography of Shelley, encouraged by Leigh ...”

“... field is dominated by American critics who place the poets, not in the setting of revolutionary France (where their ideas sprung from), but in counter-revolutionary Germany of the same period. This period is fashionable in modern America because it has ‘strong vibes for the right wing’. Critics there (and here) saw in the Romantic poets a ‘recovery of ...”

“... to finding his own food by pawing salmon from the Thames? Another royal in-law, Louis IX of France, sent Henry an elephant, the most demanding gift of all. Other potentates readily supported far bigger animal establishments. The Emperor Frederick had three private zoos, sometimes taking the more spectacular beasts on his travels; he also ran a training ...”

“... friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a ...”

“... architects ‘finished off’ or rebuilt cathedrals, abbeys and churches by the hundred, in France as in Britain. There was, apparently, something unseemly (or even ungodly) about a place of worship which showed the marks of great age too visibly. Equally, the grim rectitude (and ugliness) of the Ancient Monuments administered by the Ministry of Works ...”

“... barking dogs, rain and wind. He also used music sparely to brilliant effect, working with some of France’s best film composers, including Martial Solal, Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue. But there was sometimes so little dialogue that his assistants wondered what the actors were supposed to do. ‘On va dilater,’ he would tell them – ‘We’re going to ...”

“... severe to hit the regime since it had come into office, began in Lincolnshire. Columns of smoke rose above the English countryside. At one point the nation’s leader was tempted to take personal charge of the management of the crisis. But when the Lincolnshire problem proved to be shortlived, he unwisely wound the preventative operation down, persuading ...”

“... Germain transformed at its northern end into a wide canal from which the buildings on either side rose in silence like chiselled bluffs must have been extraordinary. So must the smaller streets in the Latin Quarter, door-deep in water. Soon enough, they could be reached by a series of wooden walkways set on tall trestles, their legs spread in the placid ...”

“... in the Winter Garden’. I didn’t plant a winter garden, but the book led on to his rose books: ‘The Old Shrub Roses’, ‘Shrub Roses of Today’, and the one about climbers and ramblers. (‘Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses’) It is this dilatory or sidelong compliance I am talking about. Here follows my own belated winter garden to the ...”

“... from the ‘golden age’ of crime mysteries. Dissolution also owes much to The Name of the Rose, though Umberto Eco’s glum postscript (‘Very little is discovered and the detective is defeated’) does not apply. Shardlake always gets his man (and/or woman).Dissolution introduces readers to Shardlake’s character and the condition of mid-Tudor ...”