“... 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 ...”

“... the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene’s womb, and that her child with Jesus connects the kings of France to the Royal House of David.Mary Magdalene appears by name in the gospels as a woman possessed by seven devils, which are driven out by Jesus. Pope Gregory the Great identified them as the seven deadly sins and conflated this Mary with the unnamed woman ...”

“... for their livelihood in retirement. Hence the massive demonstrations and strikes last year in France, Austria, Italy and Germany when changes to the system were proposed. In the UK the state pension has always been mean and, until recently, the sense of entitlement weak. In most other countries pensions are entrusted to a quasi-autonomous public body ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ‘postcolonial left’. This isn’t always a pleasant role. In April 2020, a few months before he was due to deliver the opening lecture at the Ruhrtriennale, Mbembe was told that ...”

“... on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus ...”

“... itself – Herron’s characters don’t get to travel much. In Spook Street (2017) River goes to France for the day, the first time in the series any of the slow horses leaves England (in Dead Lions, River got as far as the Cotswolds). In Joe Country they go to Wales. But mostly they don’t venture beyond the M25. (Real Tigers ends with a Wild West ...”

“... using all our senses, as well as spending time in archives, and the editors here – Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith – clearly told their contributors something similar. Like its predecessor, this collection is variable but sparkly, travelling down scholarly alleyways and shooting light into one forgotten corner after another. Best read ...”

“... naturally offering us ‘... and Germany’, Douglas Johnson doing the same for ‘... and France’, and Peter Clarke doing C’s Economic Ideas 1900-1930. WSC was wrong but not as rigidly wrong as the Treasury, which in 1930-31 was doing exactly what it would do again sixty years later, i.e. upholding the sublime ...”

“... 1918 that was too small for the open sea, and would not change his policy even after the fall of France. In late 1943, when the battle of the Atlantic was already lost, Germany finally adopted a modern long-range U-boat design, the Type XXI, but its construction fell into the hands of Albert Speer, who transformed it into another of his political-industrial ...”

“... a series of reprints – The Fourteen-Eighteen collection – edited by an antiquarian bookseller, Peter T. Scott. Adams was a product of Malvern and Cambridge, and a lieutenant in the same battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as Sassoon and Graves. His title is ironic: ‘nothing of importance’ was the official description of an ordinary day of trench ...”

“... places away from her job and family and ordinary life. She is not unhappy with marriage, or France in the l980s, but she wouldn’t want them for eternity. One of the most poignant and ambiguously beautiful moments in the novel records Agnes’s death, a compound of horror, waste and a kind of grace. Agnes has been fatally injured in a car crash (caused ...”

“... Renaissance interest in the occult. One of the outstanding papers at this conference was that of Peter Burke, who may stand here as a representative of a much wider group of historians now increasingly concerned with the recovery of popular culture. That group is disparate, its motives no less so. The concept of sections of society ‘hidden from ...”