“... VII, and soon both Worth and Poole, who had actually helped finance the Emperor’s return to France, had established a vast clientele of kings, princes and grand-dukes, stretching across Europe and beyond. Worth dressed the Princess von Metternich, Poole the Prince, and so on. Both soon acquired a new clientele in the American plutocracy. Parisian ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others. Like Ede’s life it spans the century; but, more than that, for those of us who had not grown up in houses where there were grand pianos or interesting pebbles ...”

“... world,In youth to gather up your inward strength.Mary, on the other hand, was sent as a child to France, to ‘the court of folly and of frivolous joy’.There in eternal drunken gaietyShe never heard the sterner voice of truth,But dazzled by the glittering show of vice,Was carried on the flood that leads to ruin.The idle gift of beauty she enjoyed,She was ...”

“... an arm around his neck, but More told his son-in-law: ‘If my head would win him a castle in France … it would not fail to go.’ Charles Brandon fought in showy campaigns to recover those bits of France Henry thought he owned, so he must have felt the truth of More’s words in every shuddering vertebra. He was one ...”

“... and self-righteously listen to the game on the radio. Sri Lanka are all out for 162. 31 May. France 0 Senegal 1 in the opening match. This is officially the biggest shock of all time, though the previous winners have in fact won the opening game only twice in the last seven World Cups. Globalisation fact: all 11 Senegal players play in ...”

“... Kadare dropped a few passages and added some new ones in a French edition of 1997, however, and David Bellos has changed the English text accordingly, as well as making ‘stylistic amendments here and there where they seemed called for’. (Bellos’s judgment in matters of style is not unerring. In Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, for example, which he ...”

“... study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so much the undoubted ideological confluence of English and American radicals, as the disparities between their respective national experiences in the past and their ...”

“... The colour and lively handling were part of the legacy of 17th-century Flanders to 18th-century France. The broader gestures and stormy chiaroscuro which her English contemporaries favoured, and which came to them by various routes from Caravaggio, would not have suited her. The painter John Opie is reported to have found Vigée Le Brun’s pictures good in ...”

“... the police were trying to discredit him. Tensions were running high between the rebel movement and France. The French were providing military support – 150 soldiers, later increased to 300, plus significant arms shipments – to the Hutu-dominated Habyarimana regime in Kigali, which the RPF was fighting to overthrow. Rwanda was a former Belgian colony, with ...”

“... in the drifts of Pound’s correspondence, has come to light. They were discovered in 2015 by David Hobbs, a scholar at NYU, while he was researching in the Beinecke Library at Yale, and have now been published as 21 Poems, with an introduction by Hobbs and several reproductions: pages from the typescript, a letter to Pound and another to Williams, and a ...”

“... by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th-Century Germany (1984), which attacked the new orthodoxy on a number of fronts. Blackbourn’s main ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... Sargent’s picture of a crashed aeroplane with harvesters in the foreground, painted in France in 1918, has the gawkiness of something noticed, not composed, while in David Cox’s Tour d’Horloge, Rouen it is not so much the architecture of the clock tower as the patch of bright light seen through the arch at ...”

“... fifteen years ago in China, sixty years ago in Russia and nearly two hundred years ago in France. It is a point made forcefully by Andrzej Wajda’s latest film, which depicts the struggle between Danton and Robespierre – between humanist and puritan, pragmatist and idealist. Wajda intended it as an allegory on the present-day state of Poland. But ...”