“... advanced parts of Europe in the wake of the Counter-Reformation: from Italy in the 1550s, from France after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacres of 1572, from Flanders after the fall of Antwerp in 1585. Calvinism, it transpires, was a flag of convenience for this undoctrinaire and cosmopolitan elite, many of whose members displayed scant interest in ...”

“... no more help than what he’s told by Foucault, to whom he pays a visit at the Collège de France. ‘The big baldy’, who seems unaccountably ill-disposed towards agents of the state, speaks darkly of ‘the system’ when Bayard asks who might have wished to harm his friend Roland. ‘Episteme, my arse,’ Bayard thinks as he tries to decipher a ...”

“... towards the end the threat was posed by Jacobins, who might draw Naples into an alliance with France, but there was still time for a glittering social life. He and Catherine entertained all the distinguished visitors to Naples. An account of 1770 describes the 14-year-old Mozart playing to them against an accompaniment of volcanic explosions.Hamilton’s ...”

“... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...”

“... provides fresh insight and stimulating re-interpretation. Experts in the histories of Early Modern France and America will surely quibble with Higonnet about certain points. I am not convinced, for example, that he has fully worked out the relation between slavery and the development of republicanism in late 18th century America. And although he argues that ...”

“... for propaganda purposes. Hölderlin’s mental problems have attracted considerable attention in France, from Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytical probings to Foucault’s refusal to reduce his alienation to a curable ‘unreason’. Taking up Pierre Bertaux’s ‘thesis of the noble simulant’, which explained Hölderlin’s ‘madness’ as a Hamlet-like ...”

“... Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of another kind – to do with her modern, matter-of-fact tone of voice and her narrowed focus on Jane Austen as the ...”

“... and reproductive capabilities of the communities that remained behind. Africa was transformed. David Livingstone is prominent among the figures credited with ending the slave trade. In fact, pressure for its abolition was already widespread and achieving results before he was born (in 1813) and it had been banned by the governments of the United States and ...”

“... got his commission as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment (Special Reserve). He arrived in France in July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, but was thought too old for frontline duty, and soon found himself with the battalion transport in Bécourt Wood, near Albert. On 28 or 29 July, a shell exploded beside him, and he lost his memory. In the ...”

“... on Australia and New Zealand more than they need, especially when the complex reactions to him in France and Germany are covered in one broad-brush chapter on ‘Churchill and the Europeans’. The book is invaluable nonetheless, as the first substantial attempt, based on extensive research, to document and explain how the rejected Prime Minister of 1945 ...”

“... way out in front with 189 in the past 35 years, the UK is second (39), then we get Germany (27), France (15), Japan (11), Sweden (6), Norway (2), Finland (1). Even if you rank by prize per head of population, the US remains on top (though Sweden, with home advantage, comes a close second), while Japan, which tends to come first on most of the other quality ...”

“... made only three trips to Europe – in 1906, 1909 and 1910. He said that when he returned from France, America ‘seemed a chaos of ugliness’, and later that ‘it seemed awfully raw here when I got back. It took me ten years to get over Europe.’ Whittredge found ‘the forest a mass of decaying logs and tangled brush wood, no peasants to pick up every ...”

“... anywhere in occupied Europe. Despite the fact that the UK is not a member of the eurozone, David Cameron has joined with Merkel in hectoring the recalcitrant Greeks. Not so long ago Cameron, on his first visit to the US as prime minister, declared in an interview with ABC News that, in 1940, Britain was the junior partner to America in the anti-Nazi ...”

“... had been enthusiastically adopted by Gothic as well as Greek revivalists in France.) After completing his frieze at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Flandrin returned to Saint-Germain to paint in the choir and the nave. All of his work there has recently been cleaned as part of a huge restoration project. The general effect is harmonious – or ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”