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“... Sometimes​ I’ve thought the whole idea of pleasure in Western art has been mortgaged by the French. Or maybe the Franco-Hispanic-Italo-Anglo-Dutch. It’s their artists, their subjects, their landscapes, their models, their faces. Their trees and their hills. Their beauty and beauties, their colour and light. In the current scene a few of the bad boys – long since turned grand old men – may be Germans (Kiefer, Richter, Baselitz), but, further back, isn’t there something displeasing about older German samplings? Something freakish, astringent, minoritarian, inturned? Say, Dürer, Dix, Liebermann and Nolde ...”

“... admires Rodney’s smoldering creativity, and although at a crucial moment he failed to stop the French fleet from taking command of Chesapeake Bay and thus doomed General Cornwallis to defeat at Yorktown, Rodney still possessed what another generation might call ‘the right stuff’. His fellow naval officers, either out of fear or lack of ...”

“... William of Orange was in personal command of the allied forces and was making headway against the French, but he had run out of cash to pay the siege workers. A delegation from the fledgling bank zoomed across the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first ...”

“... not nearly as good a critic as he evidently thinks he is. Compare his essay on Edward Thomas with David Bromwich’s in a recent Raritan, and you’ll see the academic critic is far better. In scholarship, on the rare occasions on which it arises, Grigson is irresponsible. In The Private Art he says that ‘years ago someone spotted that in another of ...”

“... to the distant time when I read a book a day. They begin with Lloyd George and the Generals by David Woodward,* a professor at Marshall University, which is somewhere in the New World. The difficult relations between Lloyd George, when prime minister, and the British generals from Haig onwards during the First World War have been a topic of long ...”

“... print. Dover Books brought out a paperback edition of Lady Audley’s Secret in 1974, and in 1987 David Skilton edited it for the Oxford World’s Classics. In the interim, as Lyn Pykett’s excellent introduction to a new Oxford edition explains, both Braddon and sensation fiction in general experienced a revival as a result of the rise of feminist criticism ...”

“... of 10 June 1944, a company of the 2nd SS panzer division, ‘Das Reich’, entered the small French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, herded most of its population, swollen by refugees, into barns and garages, the women and children into the church, then killed them with firearms and grenades. The panzergrenadiers had been informed that Oradour was a hotbed of ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... A recent new-wave soccer-book gives something of the flavour: Albert Camus, Algerian goalie and French Existentialist, never took a penalty but it would have been interesting to watch him try (if, say, a penalty shoot-out against a Structuralist XI went all the way to the respective goalkeepers during sudden death). Would Camus have beaten an upright and ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... The gross underestimation of the ability of the Lebanese to defend themselves is the main theme of David Hirst’s elegantly written and highly informed history. For many years one of the most perceptive correspondents in the Middle East, he says he decided to write this book after the 34-day war in the summer of 2006, when Israel rained explosives on Lebanon ...”

“... high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language from law French, and were usually glossed as meaning ‘design’ or ‘intend’. The 1794 treason trials turned on the interpretation of this obscure language: defining the meaning of ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’, and determining what ‘overt’ acts might ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... fervour: Pierre Boulez. There is some truth in Klaus Geitel’s recent observation that no French musician since the time of Lully has exerted as much power and influence as Boulez has. Both directly and indirectly, his is as much a musico-political and hence an economic power as it is a musical one. Yet the very nature of his exceptional gifts has ...”