“... he was eating when he read them: La Nouvelle Héloise with pain au beurre and a pot of coffee, Tom Jones with a roasted partridge. The contents of Rat’s picnic basket contains the world of The Wind in the Willows; the aroma of a bubble and squeak prepared by the gaoler’s daughter cheered up Toad in his prison cell; bacon and broad beans and a macaroni ...”

“... would read or go back to work.’ ‘Architecturally politicised’, the Smithsons sent Simon to Holland Park comprehensive, designed for the London County Council by Leslie Martin. ‘It was chaos,’ he remembers. He was bullied and his parents’ way of life embarrassed him, though later, he says, he came to see that his childhood had been ...”

“... There are several sardonic contributions here from members of the 1947-8 England team that beat Holland 8-0. Italy 4-0 and Portugal 10-0. For such triumphs the England players got a £10 appearance fee and a third-class train ticket home. And maybe a ‘well done’. Just around the corner lay the 1953 defeat by Hungary, and a new epoch for English ...”

“... is whether such a concatenation represents a cultural phenomenon or a happy accident of the kind Tom Stoppard plays with in Travesties, about Zurich in 1916. It’s worth recalling that all the characters in that play were ‘taken from history’, including the narrator and master of ceremonies, Henry Carr: but as Carr says of one of the more illustrious of ...”

“... various attempts at repair fail and the ship limps back to Hamburg – it has to be towed from Holland – and is scrapped. The last words of the poem are       Any child, we thought Could see that our wages had Really been too niggardly. Kuhn and Constantine tell us that ‘less than half of [Brecht’s] output of poems was published by the time of ...”

“... The narrative of The Devil’s Alternative shuttles between Washington, London, Moscow and Holland. Understandable indulgence is shown by these British authors to non-British readers. Forsyth, for example, will routinely insert parenthetic guide-book material for the ignorant, but commercially valued, foreigner: ‘At home on the outskirts of ...”

“... British or English culture, Hull occupies a special, if seldom visited position, as a gateway to Holland and Protestant Europe, as well as to the high seas. Or in Larkin’s version of Yeats’s version of Milton, Hull is a lonely tower, vigilant and visionary. Defoe, it must be recognised, is one of the most influential architects of the British national ...”

“... invades her bedroom, declaring in terrifying tones that he is lost, he will have to flee to Holland, his life is in Graffigny’s hands: if she cannot retrieve the hundred copies of his poem, which he is sure are now circulating in Lunéville, he is a dead man. Soon Mme du Châtelet joins him in the room, brandishing the fatal letter and accusing the ...”

“... the cryptography centre at Bletchley. Meanwhile Cumming had established MI6 and was finding that Holland was a good deal more hospitable to spies than Switzerland. Other ways of gathering intelligence came into use, such as aerial reconnaissance and pigeons, and in the Second World War enemy agents were not shot but turned into double agents, the master of ...”

“... light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon whom the affairs of Europe now turn; and if Heaven sends us a peace soon … it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in greater proportion than ever.’ Peace was still seven years off, but Shaftesbury’s ‘mighty light’ would ...”

“... of genuine local pride and because the name accorded so well with his own celebrated oddity: ‘Tom of Odcombe, that odd jovial author,’ Jonson calls him. After schooling at Winchester he went up to Oxford, where he ‘attained to admirable fluency in the Greek tongue’ but left without taking a degree. What we know of the Elizabethan Coryate is ...”

“... For the next decade or so, intellectual polemicists like Volney and Dupuis; Erasmus Darwin and Tom Paine promoted the notion that in this respect Christianity was originally like other religions and so no better than it should be. Hamilton led the way by writing a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the Secretary of the Dilettanti, in which he described the ...”

“... where it was becoming commercially successful. The city which had brought together de Kooning from Holland, Rothko from Russia and Oregon, Hoffman from Germany, Gorky from Russia, would now take its profit. The magazines, the newspapers, the galleries, the curators, the collectors, the critics, the whole network by which reputations are made, was in gear. The ...”

“... find being made a public spectacle so delicious, and it is remarkable that he sent William Holland to Newgate for issuing the pamphlets of Tom Paine, but not for publishing Richard Newton’s scandalous political caricatures. Newton, a brilliant cartoonist who died at the age of 21, is the subject of an exhibition ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”