“... as the ninth Marquess of Queensberry lay dying in his magnificent house in town, Emile Zola in France lovingly dusted the medal he had received a fortnight earlier for his services in the Dreyfus affair, and thousands of miles away Mafeking awoke to its hundred-and-first day of siege.’ Almost any historical novel that happened to concern itself with the ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... École Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1872. The school was a direct response to the Commune, to France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, and to a sense that its ruling class was bereft of talent, industry and imagination, its imperial and cultural mission a shambles. The university now known as Sciences Po was established as a new ‘crossroads of ...”

“... of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 feature films made over half a century he rarely did two takes of a ...”

“... to gain their freedom. Thanks to the active sponsorship of Russia and Britain, Austria and France, these groups won autonomy and then independence. By the end of the 19th century, Christendom had regained much of Ottoman Europe as well as the fringes of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Muslims – Circassians, Tartars, Bosnians and Turks – fled ...”

“... aid offered to them in their struggle by the West,’ the Times said of the Libyan rebels who rose up against Gaddafi during the Arab Spring in 2011; Western military intervention on behalf of the rebellion was ‘a good deed in a weary world’. Today, more than five years after Gaddafi’s fall in October 2011, Libya has been relegated to that class of ...”

“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... new modish effects, so that brilliant lipstick and nail varnish also came into their own as hems rose and breasts diminished, provocative shoes appeared and whalebone vanished; and Lee Miller seemed the perfect embodiment of this new feminine ideal. Everyone was aiming at it, but Miller at 18 apparently had a cool self-assurance and a strong-willed, unforced ...”

“... Wharton’s own library contained some four thousand of them, divided between her two houses in France. Yet in Wharton’s retrospective account of herself, the small child’s imaginative resistance to her environment precedes even the ability to decipher print. Edith had not yet learned to read when she first engaged in that ecstatic and solitary ritual ...”

“... An elderly woman leaving a swimming-pool makes a young woman’s gesture of goodbye:   Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly coloured ball to her lover ... The instant she turned, smiled and waved ... she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in ...”

“... can be truly enlightening, as in the chapter which deals with the Irish rebellion of 1798. In France, just before the Revolution, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Emily’s son, converted to Republicanism. It was called ‘the levelling movement’ by Lady Emily, the last person one can imagine being levelled, who placidly remarked: ‘I think it charming to hear ...”

“... according to the Bettelheim principle, but dies, leaving a flower behind her – St Joseph’s rose. Sendak would probably argue that children need to face the reality of death: but the confrontation is here made altogether queasy – and, yes, sentimental – by a miasma of piety. In spite of their veneration for the originating Volk, the Grimms ...”

“... of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English lamb. However, Yugoslavia is not a member of the Common ...”

“... on good clarets and burgundies, not as some regrettable side-effect of the Free Trade treaty with France, but in a roaring populist style which anticipates his emergence as ‘the People’s William’: Now, I make an appeal to the friends of the poor man. There is a time which comes to all of us – the time, I mean, of sickness – when wine becomes a ...”

“... added to it, to blend the scribbling madman with the rutting faun and the soaring spectre of the rose. So far as we know there were no films made of Nijinsky dancing, and we have to rely on descriptions, posed photographs, some snapshots, drawings and sketches, and the legend. But the legend itself, now that Romola and the others with the living memory are ...”