“... rose to sanctity by clinging to the coattails, or more exactly the robes, of Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri. So much for the growth of cults at the periphery. But there is also the problem of explaining how and why some of these cults were adopted by the centre and made official. The heroic virtue of the candidates had to satisfy the examiners. To ...”

“... Mustaza’fin is usually translated as ‘the deprived’ or ‘the disinherited’ – in French, as les misérables or les damnés. Khomeini had borrowed the word from both the Koran and from Shari’ati, for it was not in ordinary use before the revolution (Shari’ati had used it in his translation of Fanon’s Damnés de la Terre). This was a word ...”

“... thought much about it’. After this avowal of broad-mindedness (the tale has already been told in Philip Williams’s Hugh Gaitskell) she was fit to be introduced to (Sir) Maurice Bowra and all the other intellectual roisterers. Was it really as simple and half-baked as this? Gaitskell, we learn, was ‘eager to fix his own identity through instructing others ...”

“... The French prefer an allusive style in biography, with as little as possible of the scaffolding of scholarship showing. Jean Lacouture’s magisterial De Gaulle is virtually unfootnoted, has only a small bibliography and contains many verbatim conversations or remarks by De Gaulle that we have to take on trust, as well as many ironic thrusts and tight logical turns which can nearly knock you off your chair ...”

“... the introduction of the Listerian method.’ It was the same across Europe: Scottish, Danish and French as well as German hospitals became less dangerous. But carbolic was not safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much ...”

“... to the point of torturing and killing others. In 1971, the Stanford prison experiment, set up by Philip Zimbardo to study the interactions of students assigned the roles of prisoners and guards, had to be stopped after six days as the guards’ behaviour became more and more brutal and the prisoners became more and more vulnerable and traumatised. Given such ...”

“... travels through Greece with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, gluttonous and bibulous tours of French restaurants with his editor Jason Epstein, conversations with his Roman neighbour Italo Calvino, lunch with E.M. Forster, chat with Princess Margaret. But in Rome there were only months of reading, and Old Glory. Few people have identified themselves as ...”

“... connoisseurship to a marginal position. There was one great connoisseur in the National Gallery: Philip Pouncey, the most junior of the curators, who had been appointed by Clark himself. Pouncey recognised that the paintings were by Andrea Previtali, a minor artist who had been a pupil of Giovanni Bellini. Clark’s mistake would have been averted by some ...”

“... invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Nancy and Waldorf also regularly entertained Neville ...”

“... nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a ...”

“... during the War of 1812 Andrew Jackson called on Louisiana’s free Black militia – a legacy of French rule – to help defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson, who owned many slaves, issued an address condemning the exclusion of Blacks from the army as a ‘mistaken policy’ and praising the Black soldiers as ‘sons of freedom’.African ...”

“... disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on the centrality of the French avant-garde. Even as social and psychological readings were extended and deepened, the modern transformation of pictorial representation was credited to a celebrated line of painters from Courbet to Cézanne (with a few less well-known names like Mary ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... our trees and houses, have longer histories than our country. My family home in Bouillon, on the French border, is decked with photographs of relatives who were born before Belgium was created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian ...”

“... in Ashbery, critics of poetry have been helpfully able to find that viciousness ready to hand in Philip Larkin’s verse, especially since his death in 1985. Ashbery’s first successful volume, Some Trees, came out in 1956; Larkin’s first fully achieved collection had appeared the year before. Nearly twenty years later, when High Windows was published in ...”