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“... sounded good to her. She was envious of her clever only daughter and favoured her youngest child, David. One of Ethel’s childhood friends remembered that Tessie was ‘more bigoted than religious … If God had meant for Ethel to have music lessons, he would have provided them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the ...”

“... pillars of conventional Marxist history, from François Furet’s revisionist studies of the French Revolution to Stedman Jones’s own work re-examining the relationship between labour and capital in industrialising Britain. Meanwhile, an obsessive attention to discourse and language was sweeping through the humanities, a trend Stedman Jones’s long ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... of Habsburg domination of the continent, was France. Conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois French flared intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, France and the Habsburg Low Countries had led to a series of shifting alliances, and ...”

“... is a 1912 story of robbery, murder and retribution involving a Jewish trader, a Berber sheik and a French colonial officer. Despite the story’s complexities, Kuper shows, it hides no ‘impenetrable cultural mysteries . . . the parties grasped the nature of the business pretty adequately at the time.’ In short, a great deal of behaviour that is loosely ...”

“... times have changed, incidentally: Hattersley bobs up all over the place in these pages, and David Steel gets a couple of footnotes, but Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Owen and Arthur Scargill make no appearance.) Mrs Castle was generally rated a highly effective departmental minister, and from these diaries ...”

“... report did not endear him to the War Cabinet. He compared the British troops unfavourably with the French, and used words like ‘callow’ and ‘effeminate’ to describe their poor performance. A minor incident which may have had far-reaching consequences was Auchinleck’s sacking of the CO of the 1st Scots Guards, Lt-Col Trappes-Lomax, for abandoning a ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... in 1907, followed by Hungary, Britain and Bavaria (now the German pavilion) in 1909, and the French and Swedish pavilions in 1912 (the latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came Spain, Czechoslovakia, the US, Greece and Austria and the site was expanded across the canal to incorporate the gardens of ...”

“... do not come from sociologists of science, post-structuralist literary critics, feminist theorists, French philosophers or any of the other varied targets of ‘science wars’ criticism. They actually come from scientists: Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ...”

“... desperately unhappy. (But then, what a mass of confusion springs from the simple fact that, in French, the same word denotes both ‘madman’ and ‘fool’.) For happiness (only possible if you posit a ‘true self’) the substitute in Foucault’s system is pleasure. He liked to play with the idea that pleasure – for instance, the pleasures of hard ...”

“... English, Welsh and Germans) might never have won had they not secured aid and auxiliaries from the French, Spanish and Dutch empires. Conversely, British troops (who were also a medley of Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and Germans) fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as ...”

“... and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The ...”

“... conjunction of beauty, forlorn love, madness and premature death’ was irresistible to the French. Through her, Shakespeare suddenly became a central part of French consciousness and the preoccupation of writers such as Hugo and Dumas. The young Berlioz worshipped her from afar, but so intensely that he nearly had a ...”

“... Wales and France. The train is very crowded and he sits in Weekend First next to a middle-aged French couple who he assumes to be fans, but with nothing in their behaviour that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives at Cardiff the very proper bourgeois lady takes out her compact and with her lipstick carefully draws the ...”