“... precocious. Bored at school, he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the idea of heroic ...”

“... massive dissent and disapproval. There was no million-person march at the time of the American or French wars in the late 18th century, although there was a lot of dissent among the elites and presumably, though less widely recorded, among others. What there was, according to Favret, was the poet William Cowper, publishing The Task in 1785 in the aftermath of ...”

“... protons raced around the LHC’s huge ring, 27 kilometres in circumference. They criss-crossed the French-Swiss border more than ten thousand times a second before smashing into each other, releasing primordial fireworks. Huddled with my colleagues around a laptop, watching the LHC come online was a thrilling moment, but also, for many of us, a rueful ...”

“... also immensely productive for European (though not for British) cinema; the films Kafka saw were French, German, Italian and Danish. Some film historians argue that prewar European cinema, with its reliance on long takes and staging in depth, should be understood as an alternative to Hollywood’s increasingly rapid-fire cut-and-paste. It would be nice to ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... be unique to this country, although the historian Mary Jo Maynes has identified a smaller group of French and German autobiographies. It is striking, therefore, that contributors to the first wave of ‘history from below’, including E.P. Thompson, used working-class memoirs so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon ...”

“... and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of Collaborators (even ...”

“... a supply of American blood. On a visit to Britain in the 1950s, de Gaulle brought a few bottles of French blood with him, so as not to be contaminated with inferior cross-channel plasma if he required a tranfusion. Macmillan didn’t have a refrigerator, so the blood was stored in the squash court. No such problem for Bush: his spare blood is in the fridge in ...”

“... first. But then he always won. The little wooden men under my command could be English, Dutch or French: it made no difference; not one of them ever escaped from Colditz. This was staggeringly frustrating, but I can draw retrospective consolation from knowing that we were unwittingly recapitulating a more authentic version of Colditz – one in which escape ...”

“... of his outstanding Modernity and Self-Identity’. Foucault, ‘shrouded in a special removable French cloak and with a built-in thoughtful head movement’, ‘waves his baton in post-structuralist style at all challenges’. Anyone who wishes to buy a figure can send off $14.99, quoting the relevant catalogue number (THEOR-01-69-GID or ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... of the varieties of representation of the artist from the Reformation and Renaissance to, say, David Hockney. Van Dyck made numerous self-portraits. His friend Rubens’s picture of him confirms the likeness Van Dyck made in his own work. Rubens’s self-portrait is both a picture of a successful man, and an advertisement for himself. He has his head ...”