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“... was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the charts with tracks such as ‘Bamboléo’. It was plausible, Bogdal writes, that their ‘lively, upbeat songs might have been playing at festive barbeques in Rostock’ while the asylum reception centre ...”

“... his own party as oppressors of Ireland or India, or as feeble fellow-travellers with the French Revolution. All of these things he did; but the ‘great melody’ – of whose historical reality there is no doubt – is certainly to be heard in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and O’Brien has not taken enough account of recent work (I ...”

“... of them – scanning is required if you want to be offered housing. In Niamey, Niger’s capital, French and UN specialists assess asylum claims at a distance of several thousand miles from the French coast, with only the most plausible applicants approved for the onward journey. It’s the sort of offshore processing that ...”

“... of the revolt against Spain’. Of the 17 provinces of the Netherlands which rebelled against Philip II in the 1560s, only the seven northern provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Gelderland, Groningen and Overijsel) were able to resist the Spanish armies, making good use of their waterlogged terrain for a guerrilla war of combined ...”

“... overall failure, Motion himself supplies the required epitaph: ‘At a time when many English, French and Spanish contemporaries filtered the lessons of their predecessors through distinctly modern sensibilities, George remained studiously traditional. He chose revivalism where they opted for pastiche; he preferred lavish reduplication where they ...”

“... who in a single month, June 1789, discovered not only the papers of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, on which most of our knowledge of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court ...”

“... put it. ‘the only ones that made all three brows’. Chandler shattered cultural barriers with Philip Marlowe, private investigator, immortalised on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of ...”

“... their careers. H.W. Stubbs of Charterhouse went on to teach classics at the University of Exeter. Philip Toynbee was expelled from Rugby, but then handed over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin ...”

“... one, in which the projection of sovereign power and ideology was the driver of overseas expansion? Philip Stern’s commanding history of British corporate imperialism suggests that the question is poorly framed. In an earlier book, he influentially presented the East India Company as a ‘company-state’, a hybrid uniquely successful in making government its ...”

“... collection – Chinese porcelains, Fragonard’s ‘Progress of Love’ panels, 18th-century French furniture – and keep the library intact; next, she ousted the dealers he had appointed to oversee the sale and managed the operation herself. In the end she netted him a profit of $3 million, but her real mission was personal. ‘I have definitely ...”

“... David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was ...”

“... It is said that, the night before the capture of Quebec from the French in 1759, General Wolfe read Gray’s Elegy aloud to his officers as they crossed the St Lawrence River. ‘I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow,’ he is supposed to have said ...”

“... grade (PS 135, in Queens). Mrs Froelich, for some reason, was spending most of her time speaking French. (I remember the line ‘Nous allons marcher ensemble.’) And then she went on strike, along with the rest of her union. No more French. No more marching ensemble. Parents set up an interim school in the ...”

“... a proper sense of ‘America’ as comprehending everything from the Coppermine River down through French-speaking Canada to Cape Horn: either that, or else ‘the Americas’, an elegantly archaic usage that we might do well to refurbish. In LRB at the end of May, Graham Hough, reviewing Burnt Water by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes,2 complained that, whereas ...”

“... to Lamb, a different picture emerged, clarified by scholars in other fields, notably the great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting ...”