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“... fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed. In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin ...”

“... the fortune that he had inherited from his father. Before it ended, Scott absconded once more to France. ‘I am in rather a droll position,’ he told a friend: I have been declared legally a lunatic and, though perfectly capable of managing other people’s affairs, incapable of managing my own affairs in England, while here in ...”

“... where Le Corbusier was born in 1887, lies a thousand feet up in the Jura, only a few miles from France. The largely 19th-century town was built on a strict grid, and housed a Calvinist population steeped in the puritanism that he both loathed and made his own. Edouard (his name in the family) referred to it as a ‘leprous place’ and revelled in his ...”

“... global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised ...”

“... short of his own standards’) than the translation of the Lives by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella that I’ve just quoted from. Perspectives (the French title has brackets around the final, unpronounced ‘s’) is an epistolary novel, with twenty correspondents: more than twice as many as in Les Liaisons dangereuses and almost as many as in ...”

“... lengths, mainly about directors, arranged alphabetically, and chiefly by writers from Britain, France and the United States. Roud himself supplies 17 of them, including perceptive essays on Bresson and Renoir; he has chosen the fine illustrations, and he makes supplementary comments, often with book-lists, alongside the entries themselves. ‘Most of the ...”

“... As Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russias, lay dying in 1725, the future of the Imperial dynasty hung on his choice of successor. Peter, the first to take the title of emperor, had issued a law granting to himself the power to appoint whoever he liked as successor, but had continued to ponder the question, having had his own eldest son condemned and executed for serving as a rallying-point for opposition ...”

“... Bien Phu (the Army was betrayed by the politicians) and a heated argument about whether Mendès-France was a Communist or a socialist, Willard’s host (played by Christian Marquand, an old actor friend of Brando’s and the director of Candy) gives an eloquent explanation of why they must stay in this place where they are not wanted, where their time is ...”

“... as numbers of votes became the crucial determinant of political power this was a fatal weakness. Peter Merkl’s computerised analysis of the autobiographies of 581 members of the Nazi Party shows anti-semitism to have been a much stronger motive for joining before 1923 than afterwards. What is more, it shows, not only that anti-semitism was subordinate to ...”

“... women became a primary subject of her art, and she often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely ...”

“... are now some 20,000 recognised refugees in Britain, 30,000 in Holland, five times that number in France and over a million in Germany. According to the Government’s proposals, benefits would be withheld from anyone who failed to apply for asylum immediately on arrival, and from those involved in the lengthy process of appealing a decision to deny them ...”

“... not only the improvement of biographical fact but the artistic shaping of it. No one would accuse Peter Gwyn, author of The King’s Cardinal, of confusing life with art. His intentions are too austere to risk that imputation. Although his important and very long book proclaims itself a ‘biography’ of Thomas Wolsey, it fulfils few of the expectations ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... commerce that it generated over the three centuries from 1200 to 1500, provide the themes for Peter Spufford’s splendid book. Spufford’s magisterial study Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (1988) laid the foundations for this larger project; it is the fruit of extensive further research, both in the archives and on the ground, following the routes ...”

“... Berkeley wondered in 1735 whether ‘credit be not the principal advantage that England hath over France ... [and] over every other country in Europe’.* The years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars present a little more of a problem. Britain was certainly the banker of the various coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet ...”