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“... In the autumn of 1358, another ‘Great Company’ of English and Breton routiers under Robert Knolles invaded the rich Loire provinces, moving on into the Nivernais and the Auxerrois. ‘They brought the whole of the region under their control, ordering every village great or small to ransom itself and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every ...”

“... should be together for ever. ‘You will find happiness,’ he told her. They were at lunch. The winter held days of sunshine, noons of infinite calm. He broke a piece of bread to cover his confusion, dismayed at the tense of his verb. ‘Do you think so?’ she said coolly. Nothing escaped her. The lover, like the reader, notices everything. Last ...”

“... may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative furniture were often arranged, or rearranged. And Robb’s stories are, after ...”

“... have been better reflected in another abstract perfume, Chanel No. 19, invented for her by Henri Robert in December 1970, the month before she died. It was named for her birthday, 19 August. Tania Sanchez describes it as ‘a striking and admirably dissonant portrait’ of the 87-year-old Chanel, ‘from the silvery hiss of its nail-polish-remover beginnings ...”

“... contains an exemplary thumbnail history of 1848, a flawless account of the Siege of Paris in the winter of 1870 and a dead-eyed résumé of the Commune the following year. During the siege, Sante reminds us, hunger drove Parisians to extremes: mouse pâté with fur in the mix; cats and rats; ‘dog-liver brochettes’. Eventually the specimens in the Jardin ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... as Transhumance refers to the nomadic shepherd’s practice of moving flocks between summer and winter pastures and encloses the ideas of the human and of the earth (humus). ‘So it is with the transhumance routes of translation, the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated, the movement of huge flocks of words through all the ...”

“... add to love new heat,As princes do in time of action getNew taxes, and remit them not in peace,No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.The analogy is strange, even by Donne’s standards. Instead of natural abundance, we get unjust tax policy, spring’s increase weirdly converted to a financial burden. The couple were, in fact, deeply in ...”

“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... up the cost of everything, and diverts money from honest citizens, including the recipients of winter fuel payments, who go cold and hungry as a result. No doubt there are more extreme, exotic or intellectualised forms of ethno-nationalism on social media, built on grander conspiracy theories, but Reform doesn’t need them. A folk wisdom that gestures ...”

“... There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the ...”

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

“... and then stopped again. Here, outside the city, there was still some snow on the ground’? (It is winter not Walter that has returned to the city.) It is the beauty of Musil’s German, at once sensuous and intellectually intense, that gives weight to this novel about weightlessness. It’s in the words, in the extraordinary metaphoric richness of the ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”