“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 works planned but not published. Some of what was published in his lifetime was published in French, by his friend Dumont, with little help from Bentham, and retranslated into English. After his death his disciple Bowring added to the confusion by publishing an edition of Bentham’s works which seems to aim at recording Bowring’s interpretation of ...”

“... identity. First, this was for many centuries a country dominated and peopled by the French. The Norman and Plantagenet kings never fully distanced themselves from their French roots. In Crusader times, England was a part of the French empire. Its kings were Guillaume and ...”

“... societies with their institutions, cultures and perceived or experienced histories – Florentine, French, English, Dutch; others were cosmopolitan respublicae christianae or républiques des lettres, in which massive schematisations of discourse were produced, circulated and discussed both in and out of ‘national’ context. These communities – both the ...”

“... was being interrogated by the Gestapo in Lyon, Leclerc was still in North Africa with the Free French; the 2nd Armoured Division had yet to be constituted. And of course you can’t be seen to underplay de Gaulle or ignore the rogues’ gallery of Nazi puppets and collaborators: enter Marshal Pétain, mysteriously central to the liberation of Paris. The ...”

“... names: as John Horne in the age of the American Revolution, and as John Horne Tooke in that of the French Revolution. In both identities he attracted notoriety or fame, according to the prejudices of commentators. Extolled as a champion of liberty and mocked as a mischief-maker in countless cartoons and ballads, pamphlets and newspapers, Horne Tooke was a man ...”

“... and of the three most obviously the outsider in pre-revolutionary France. Born in Martinique of French parents, she was designated a Creole when she came to France to be married, at sixteen, to the eldest son of her aunt’s lover, in a bid to boost the family’s status. The marriage was not a success in that or any other way. Her ...”

“... Then, on the basis of various points on this line, we are to construct a hexagram (a Star of David) inside a circle, which patterns the space at the top of the painting between one sitter and the other. Then, we are to observe that a horoscope square (the skeleton of a ‘geniture’, or birth-prediction of someone’s fortune) fits handily over the ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”