“... circles, mixing with Mallarmé, Alphonse Daudet, André Gide and Rodin, Renard only ever had one foot in Paris, and in 1904, following after his father, he was elected mayor of Chitry. His roots, he was always eager to stress, were ‘still covered in earth’. Missing in the photographs is his hair colour. In 1896, crushing heavily on Sarah Bernhardt (she ...”

“... the casinos.     Magritte invites him in, steps back to let him pass and, the moment he sets foot in the drawingroom, gives him a tremendous kick up the backside. The astounded visitor hesitates between the multitude of reactions that come to mind, and in the end sits down as if nothing had happened on the chair which Magritte, as if nothing had ...”

“... when we realise that the delegated author of the four late novels – Gary’s mysterious cousin Paul Pavlowitch – began to act independently of his manipulator: eventually Gary had to ask him to bow out of the competition for a further Prix Goncourt, when he had already violated their agreement by giving his photograph to the press. This unexpected ...”

“... as he might be about what constitutes the break between then and now. Conversely, a great many foot soldiers in the free-market brigade would be surprised to learn that they were marching against institutions. It was Friedrich Hayek, after all, who argued that law was a condition of liberty rather than a constraint; that traditional institutions were ...”

“... once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that ...”

“... with ‘the civilising coloniser’. Forty years after Fanon, in The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy tilted the idea of double consciousness towards a more elastic, miscegenated doubleness, proposing that cultures ostensibly defined by ethnicity – and divided historically as slaver and slave, coloniser and colonised, white and Black – are not ...”

“... century, they were forced to travel along perilous Saharan slave routes, crossing the desert on foot, sailing up the Nile to Egypt and across the Red Sea to the Arabian peninsula. Their numbers peaked in the 19th century, when roughly 1.2 million Africans were sold into slavery in Ottoman lands. An estimated 362,000 Africans were taken to Ottoman Egypt ...”

“... and Handel. Tyers commissioned a statue of Handel in informal pose – a slipper falling from his foot, lyre in hand – as the Gardens’ centrepiece and presiding spirit (there is much about the Englishing of Handel in Brewer’s study). The Gardens’ pavilions and supper boxes were hung with contemporary English paintings, especially by Francis Hayman. In ...”

“... that he can walk on water, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana Spencer, he thought he had chosen the ideal bride, yet it turned out that he had made the most terrible mistake of his life. The most important thing that a Prince of Wales has to do is to choose the right wife. Neither George IV ...”

“... 8.35). We were given the example of the Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, where the pastor Paul Yonggi Cho had built up a congregation of 500,000 members, through the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit. My notes for that day are full of numbers: ‘3770 verses, 4 gospels. 727 – 19 per cent! – refer to healing/rez of dead’. On Wednesday we were ...”

“... rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To ...”

“... deeds under the Pinochet regime), construction has continued apace. Blackwater is building a 6000-foot airstrip and facilities to house its aviation wing of 20 transport planes and helicopters, as well as a large hangar for the construction of airships and a plant to make an armoured vehicle called the Grizzly. The founder and owner of Blackwater, Erik ...”

“... Francis Quarles), while one of his maternal great-grandmothers was Cherokee. When Hughes first set foot in Africa in 1923, having jettisoned his studies at Columbia and shipped out as a mess boy, none of the people he encountered in Dakar or Lagos or the other West African ports at which his boat docked considered him Black. ‘The Africans looked at me,’ he ...”

“... Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the collapsing buildings and ...”

“... Further investigation revealed other corrective details. Mrs Cotterill was indeed tiny (four foot six inches), but she had never had children, and like most people in the street at that time she did not have a telephone. She drank quite a bit, and was sectioned more than once, but her former West Indian neighbours insist that most of the time they all ...”