“... who became the second British driver to win a Grand Prix race, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Denis, and Prince Birabongse Bhanudej Bhanubandh of Siam, who raced as ‘B. Bira’ in a car painted ‘bright peacock blue, its hue selected … to match a piece of fabric cut one night from the gown of a girl with whom he was dining at the Savoy’. After ...”

“... on one of those bum-freezing outdoor coats, an operation which wastes thousands of man-hours every winter. Who loves zips, other than the television producers who show us gentlemen audibly operating them as they exchange information in those obligatory urinal scenes? Chenoune does not wholly ignore the zip. He quotes an authority as saying, in the context of ...”

“... translated as Platform, 2003) he is even called Michel. Nevertheless, it’s a shock, on reading Denis Demonpion’s biography, to learn quite how much of Houellebecq’s life has been thrust raw – though often distorted – into his novels. It’s no surprise that his first novel is, like many first novels, closely modelled on the author’s life: like ...”

“... clubs smashed and their neighbourhoods redrawn. Food shortages, rampant inflation and a pitiless winter conspired to exacerbate popular suffering. The capital’s tollgates, ripped down in 1789, were up and running again by 1798. Slaves who had fought for their freedom were coerced into labouring on plantations under the logic of ‘republican racism’, in ...”

“... 14 fructidor, an III (31 August 1794). The previous year, the royal effigies from the Abbey of St Denis had been transferred to the former monastery of the Petits Augustins on the left bank of the Seine, a depot already filled with historical monuments salvaged by Alexandre Lenoir together with treasures confiscated by the state. It took Lenoir several years ...”

“... and the family lived in a grand and mobile fashion: summer at Deauville and the Channel resorts; winter on the Côte d’Azur; autumn at a country château, first in Normandy, later at Rouzat in the Auvergne. Henri was an atypical bourgeois. ‘I have quite enough money,’ he said. ‘My children should learn how to spend it, not earn it.’ He declined to ...”

“... official silence around much of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal; for the restoration of pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, global improvements in health and education, and closer co-operation between governments to deal with international crises. You don’t have to agree with all of his causes, or believe they are practical, to accept that he has become a ...”

“... luxuriantly and I should end up looking like Bernard Ingham or (this in the interests of balance) Denis Healey. However, I am getting on and there will scarcely be time for the development of comparable thickets so today I am tidied up. The last time I remember having related thoughts was when I was 17 and had not yet started to shave. Though most of my ...”

“... secured the nomination in the 1950 General Election, and in the process met and became engaged to Denis Thatcher, a man whose ‘views were no-nonsense Conservatism’. This was the making of Mrs Thatcher, not only literally, because it gave her the name under which she was to become famous, but because Denis’s support ...”

“... assets, Paulinus and Therasia – or their friends Melania and Pinianus, who visited Nola in the winter of 406 – had embraced poverty: they retained control over substantial resources. Shielded from the demands of family, local communities and the imperial tax system, they could use their newly unencumbered wealth to support Christian ...”

“... brusque ‘Ullo, ullo, ullo’ to wreck any chance of intimacy. The scripts were by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, very funny in their day and funny enough now. Ken Livingstone’s mother was an Eth: Ethel Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a ...”

“... Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and even non-Impressionists like Puvis, Léon Bonnat, Sargent and Maurice Denis – recognised Morisot’s quality and treated her as an equal. Durand-Ruel, the pioneering dealer who (a century before Saatchi) batch-bought rising artists, took four of her pictures in 1872. Even the critics paid her the compliment of condemning her ...”

“... than riot and affray, and will stand young men in better stead than their combustion spree in the winter of 2005, prompted by the death of two teenagers electrocuted in Clichy-sous-Bois as they hid from the police in an EDF substation. The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 April, with the run-offs on 6 May – has moved matters along at ...”

“... question arises when reading the four novels Moore published between 1957 and 1965 and reading Denis Sampson’s carefully judged and definitive biography. Moore became increasingly fascinated by failure, by the idea of the painful case, the more successful he became. All four of these novels deal in failure, and he himself, from early on, was alert to ...”

“... in his days as an inhouse gambler at the Clermont Club, ate nothing but lamb cutlets, summer and winter, Marnham worked out the approximate number of sheep the disappearing milord must have chomped his way through during his days of dim glory.) Robb’s final chapter is both très Robb and très British. Browsing in a Latin Quarter bookshop, he discovers ...”