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“... 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 ...”

“... the Bull of Revesby). His wife was 9 stone 6 in 1781 and 13 stone 12 in 1794. His sister Sophia rose from 11 stone 8 in 1778 to 14 stone 3 in 1794. When Banks was well into his seventies a drunken coachman overturned the carriage in which this substantial trio were travelling. ‘We were obliged,’ Banks wrote, ‘to lie very uneasily at the bottom of the ...”

“... almost unchanged for two hundred years’. In fact, the farms incessantly changed hands, rents rose, arrears were no longer allowed, half the population left Orkney between 1861 and 1901 and a third left the three islands in the Muirs’ group during the thirty years which surrounded Edwin’s childhood. Small farms were amalgamated, the families ...”

“... happened in Europe, where modern humans replaced the indigenous Neanderthals. Stringer’s star rose dramatically when new dating techniques showed that caves on Mount Carmel in Israel were occupied by modern humans almost 100,000 years ago, before the Neanderthals. Indeed, Neanderthals and moderns seem to have occupied the same caves but at different ...”

“... new one for Virilio: it was sketched out in his L’Art du moteur, a bestseller four years ago in France. Though the provision of detailed evidence is hardly the forte of Open Sky, Virilio does back up the claim that the body is being industrialised by examining advances in ophthalmology. This is why the book is interested in free-fall: the visual experiences ...”

“... the entirely fictional one of the monastery of San Michele in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Since the layout of the library is so important to the plot of the novel, it has been possible for fans to count the number of rooms, calculate the number of shelves, and estimate the number of volumes the library contained – it comes to about ...”

“... seen in England and that the same fleecy cirrocumulus that presaged fair weather in England and France augured heavy rain in Italy. Studied close up by local observers, nature looked motley, however hard leading scientists in London and Paris pressed for standardised data that could be distilled into generalisations about weather everywhere and always. The ...”

“... down Neville Chamberlain. When, in September 1939, Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, rose to reply to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak for England!’ (In Alan Bennett’s Forty ...”

“... Israel’s destruction of Palestine. The campaign (which has been quite successful in Germany and France) was launched after the reinvasion of the West Bank three years ago, after the devastation of Jenin (which capitulated, to the great pride of the Israeli army, on Holocaust Day 2002). The language that pro-Israelis and representatives of Israel use to ...”