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“... this stricture to gentile wine, perhaps holding some secret suspicions regarding the prayers of French vintners. But in Rabbi Loew’s day the religious authorities made a distinction between ordinary wine (and bread) and that used for ritual purposes, permitting Jewish consumption of the former, especially in Moravia and in Poland near the Hungarian border ...”

“... to take care of itself.We don’t know yet whether the British government will have to follow the French, who had to follow the Spanish, who had to follow the Italians, down the road to a total shutdown of major cities. Libertarians inside the government will resist. But if and when that resistance becomes futile and the army is called on to patrol the ...”

“... there was no longer a viable balance of power in Europe. Interventionists warned that if the French or British fleet fell into Hitler’s hands the Atlantic would become a German lake. Roosevelt talked of the new age of air-power. What if the Nazis established themselves in Fascist states in South America, within a few hours’ bombing time of Washington ...”

“... form of ‘existential Jewishness’. In May 1968, when the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit – French-born but the son of German refugees – was sentenced by the government to deportation, the rallying cry along the Paris barricades was: ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’ To the protesters, ‘German Jew’ represented a collective identity ...”

“... Spurs had a vacancy when they did – a vacancy created by the resignation of Tel’s predecessor, David Pleat. Pleat had been fingered by the Sun as a kerb-crawler and there was much bar-room speculation at the time about tip-offs, fit-ups, Sun stringers on the Met. The first Sun revelations came in July 1987, and Pleat survived these. The second round came ...”

“... could be expedited if she and Helmut simply got a room. Thatcher’s problems were all with the French. As leader of the opposition she had had a bad experience at a briefing with the director of the IMF, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, ‘a languid, cigarette-smoking French intellectual of the type she had probably never ...”

“... two other biographies in English already exist: Iain Hamilton’s Koestler: A Biography (1982) and David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). But Scammell has little time for either work. His bibliography dismisses Hamilton’s book as ‘superficial and ill-researched’, and Cesarani’s (the one which attacked Koestler as a serial ...”

“... at least five languages, so she is attuned to the polyglot Strindberg, who taught himself German, French, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew, even writing books in French. Prideaux is also an accomplished novelist, and the prize-winning biographer of Strindberg’s friend Edvard Munch. Any biographer of Strindberg has to assess ...”

“... he arrives, and he learns to his horror that his mother died in the workhouse. The narrator in David Plante’s The Foreigner is a peeping Tom – twice in the book he experiences orgasm while watching or listening to other people making love – and he tells his story in a detached, remote style which at moments has echoes of Bainbridge’s accomplished ...”

“... to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, David Lilienthal remarked: ‘Where this will lead us is difficult to see. We keep on saying, “We have no other course.” What we should be saying is, “We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ” The interesting question is whether contemporary ...”

“... scalding, staplebound enemy of mixed metaphors, pan-Germanism, the House of Habsburg, everything French, pro-semites and anti-semites, and the popular press, especially Vienna’s paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. In 1899, the 24-year-old Kraus – the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer from Gitschin in Bohemia, now Jičín in the Czech Republic ...”

“... certainly she would have thought so, and that is clearly the point in the mock-Tudor subtitle of David Loades’s biography. Mary’s failure dealt a permanent blow to England’s long-standing alignment with the Habsburgs and their Burgundian predecessors. Both Mary and Elizabeth had a capacity for inspiring loyalty from close friends, who formed their ...”

“... but most of the time as the icon of the Little Flower which was to serve as a talisman for so many French soldiers in Flanders. The anthropologist William Christian discovered the discarded negatives of a man who had worked at the Basque shrine of Ezquioga in the Thirties. Comparing them to the photographs which were chosen as official souvenirs, he found that ...”

“... focus of his thoughts. Armstrong has long since smoothed away any imperfections. Even the pidgin French he uses in interviews sounds like a lightweight, customised idiom, reduced to essential components, designed to repel the sludge of ambiguities and misperceptions. We walk beside the riders as they skim through the thinning crowd to their air-conditioned ...”

“... return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again. In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists ...”