“... us than that of diversitvy, which epitomises for us a long past of misfortune and abjection?’ It may be less the fact than the cult of regional diversity that tells us something Specific about the history of France.There is a second claim for French specificity in Braudel’s account, less prominent or pursued, but comparable in kind. Turning from geography ...”

“... the Cross!’; or that the photographer Nadar was shortsighted to the point of blindness; or that Ernest Renan recoiled from the English word ‘comfort’ in 1859 with ‘I am forced to use this barbarous word to express an idea quite un-French’; or that after Thermidor, busts of Marat and Le Peletier were transferred, presumably from the high altar of the ...”

“... side. My father advised caution: ‘Best not to have too many illusions; the anti-imperialists may not have been as solid as you think.’ Both my mother and my father broke politically with the family, and became communists. My father was very active in the party, which delayed their wedding a bit. My grandfather refused to allow her to marry a communist ...”

“... that is, no gradation in nature’. Commended to the English reader by the impeccably liberal Ernest Barker (who performed the same service for Oakeshott’s survey of contemporary political doctrines soon afterwards, forming an incongruous trait d’ union between the two men), Strauss’s book was on the whole well received by Oakeshott, as the most ...”

“... an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special ...”

“... is what moves his naturalism beyond pessimistic determinism. The actions and circumstances of man may be understood as a product of his biology and social environment, but through careful study of these forces we can choose to act in ways that counter them. Therefore, Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it ...”

“... quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so … Later, I watched him in the pub and noticed his beautiful wife, but I did not want to go too close to him. He was dead within three years. More than twenty years later in Paris, the French ...”

“... states in Africa and Asia and no doubt Latin America as well (Cuba and Venezuela spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine ...”

“... the world of ‘my mother’s taste’. My whole life up to now – as even the slow-witted reader may have deduced – has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things. Now especially, her world is largely one of kitty cats, splashy floral bedspreads and pillow shams, Mrs See’s ...”

“... the depiction of autocrats in Cameroonian cartoons to Christian eschatology to posthumanism. We may not be sure where all this leads us, but Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ‘postcolonial left’. This isn’t ...”

“... CDs – the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly longing for things unseen.Yet ...”

“... it was Anita Brookner.’ The young man, who seemed remarkably undeferential, said security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’ The footman said: ‘Yes, maam.’ It was as if he was talking to his grandmother, and not for the first time the Queen was made ...”

“... mothers are an essential item of equipment in any psyche, and that though relations with mothers may be difficult or even dreadful, attachment to them is mandatory. They also know, as a corollary, that a denial of attachment is a failure to confront the reality of mother-attachment.‘You must find it very disturbing.’‘No, I find it ...”