“... New World nor the probable end of the rest of it, neither his turning 60 (as he, something of a Peter Pan, wished never to do) nor whatever thanatophile twinkle he had in his eye, enabled him to transcend his ordinary possibilities. Fowles calls it his ‘least personal biography’. Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth’s sometime friend and fellow exile, and ...”

“... celebrated sense. Such communities are a decisive survival tool, because they embody what Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, in Not by Genes Alone (2004), have described as ‘ultra-sociality’. Human ultra-sociality is quite different from the communal networks formed among so many other species. As Durkheim showed in The Elementary Forms of Religious ...”

“... and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of ...”

“... and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”

“... slow history of how the European aristocracy finally learned to behave in an aristocratic way. Peter Burke treats The Book of the Courtier as an ‘open text’, whose dialogue form and apparent tensions and contradictions may reflect its author’s refusal to offer a simple moral, as well as the long time that he spent at work on it and the changes in his ...”

“... as an honoured guest in various villas and châteaux, on Capri, in Sweden, Germany, Austria, France. The patron of the Duino Elegies, said on the title-page to be their owner, was the Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis-Hohenlohe, mistress of the castle at Duino on the Adriatic. Rilke spent the years of the First World War back in Munich, then settled, as ...”

“... Marlowe novels, the first a series written by an often-expatriate American living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler ...”

“... that Chaucer mentions (‘His barge ycleped was the “Maudelayne”’). That ship’s master, Peter Risshenden, together with the famous pirate John Hawley, captured three ships loaded with wine. Such activity is behind these lines: Ful many a draughte of wyn had he ydrawe Fro Burdeux-ward, whil that the chapman sleep. Of nyce conscience took he no ...”

“... sentenced to death. He escaped, possibly killing his guard, fled to Belgrade, Beirut and finally France, where he joined the Foreign Legion, was wounded and captured before escaping again and moving on to Britain to avoid the advancing Nazi forces.His decision to join the British army led to two noteworthy incidents. First, with reckless courage, he stormed ...”

“... to ensure that their cables were never ‘flabby’ or ‘cute’. ‘Be strategically nasty,’ Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, recommended.The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables (only 6 per cent of them classified as ‘secret’) was treated by the national security establishment and its helpmates as ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... shah’s ambitions for Iran to ‘become politically and economically co-equal with England and France before the end of this century’ were ‘well-known’.These ambitions informed Iran’s cultural policies. A country seeking to upend historic power relations needed institutions that rivalled those of its old colonial foes, and the circle around Empress ...”

“... but divided in his national identity and allegiance, for, despite being passionately committed to France, he was granted French citizenship only after two years of war service, and two years before his death at the age of 38 of Spanish influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger ...”

“... was about to fall. Fall it did, in 1376, when it was taken from its English garrison by Jean de France, Duc de Berri. According to Jean d’Arras, who wrote an influential account of the whole legend, he was told the story by his patron, the duc himself, who put in much more detail. In the duc’s version Mélusine appeared to the English commander, a ...”

“... the support of the queen,’ Lownie writes, ‘and the endorsement of the former trade secretary Peter Mandelson.’ Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public ...”