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“... a lot – a mode of viewing that is ‘critical-paranoid’ (I mean this term positively, as Philip K. Dick did when he defined the paranoiac as a person hell-bent on the truth). In the mid-19th century a French painter might remove any evidence of industrial production from his beautiful landscapes, while his American ...”

“... at least a dozen candidates for the succession had been identified, with James jostling alongside Philip II of Spain’s daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia and his own English-born first cousin Arbella Stuart.The term ‘regime change’ was coined in the US in the 1920s, but Doran applies it to the dynastic shift in 1603, which ‘despite all the contradictory ...”

“... be literature after reunification? It strikes one as something of a science fictional question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War Two, and proceeded to divide the United States down the middle into two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry ...”

“... history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class ...”

“... Robert, Lord Rich, who in 1581 married Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex. She was Sir Philip Sidney’s inamorata, the Stella of Astrophil and Stella. This is not a very auspicious connection, however, as cousin Rich is punningly guyed throughout Astrophil, and painted as a coarse, heartless booby. In 1564, aged 13, he was admitted as a ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”

“... My maternal grandfather, Abram, who spoke several languages (Yiddish, Russian, German, English, French, with smatterings of Turkish and Arabic), left Ukraine to escape conscription into the tsar’s army and made his way hair-raisingly across Europe to end up in Liverpool. His wife, Elizabeth, no less enterprising, left Ukraine in search of work, also ...”

“... Liberty Tree – as she does – that it ‘attacks contemporary Unionism for betraying the French and Irish Republican principles of ’98’. You can’t ‘betray’ what you never subscribed to, and Unionism evolved in direct opposition to those enlightened principles. What Paulin is deploring, in this book, is one kind of discontinuity, the ...”

“... Foundation, which the Oxford Department of Education had produced in 1960. When 374 pupils in French lycées, and 335 in German gymnasien, were asked to compile an imaginary Baccalauréat or Abitur in which they were allowed to drop all but four subjects, and to choose those four without restriction, only five out of the 709 chose all four from the ...”

“... Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Unless clearly backed by an important publishing house or journal, as with Victor Gollancz or ...”

“... which is sometimes also used for Jessica, who is mainly Decca but sometimes Squalor. Nancy is French Lady but sometimes just Lady; in everyday settings she answers to Naunce or Naunceling. Lady Redesdale is The Poor Old Female or Fem and her husband is most often Farve. Diana is sometimes called Bodley because she was thought by Nancy to have a big ...”

“... girl’: how, he asked in indignation, could his son afford that? Cranborne concluded that the French would never make reliable allies. Macmillan, Crookshank and Cranborne were known to have become hostile to appeasement by the late 1930s, but the three MPs shared a golf-club anti-semitism. When Cranborne went to Versailles in 1919, Macmillan had written ...”

“... version of that entity had been in question for some time. Eliot derived his poetics from the French Symbolists, so that it was impossible for him to follow Matthew Arnold in finding a solution to spiritual turbulence in poetry as such. The language of poetry cannot deliver a solution of this kind, indeed cannot even comment authoritatively on such a ...”

“... as ‘self-realisation’, was ripe with potential for illiberal outcomes. The upshot of both the French and the Russian Revolutions (Berlin had experienced the second of these as a boy) was authoritarian state structures restrictive of individual freedoms. Negative liberty from constraints seemed a ‘more humane ideal’ than the otherwise admirable goal of ...”

“... had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which ...”