“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... magazine’s staff correspondent, Dean Brelis, who had covered the Vietminh’s struggle against France in the 1950s. That night in the Commodore bar, no one laughed. No one told old stories. No one that I can recall mentioned what we had seen. We just drank. I composed a story the next day on my portable Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter for the ...”

“... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...”

“... lives, talk and attitudes of the vast majority of the population in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s ...”

“... watch it, will find himself taken up by the Modern Painters crowd, the disciples of the late Peter Fuller. As a high-profile poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against ...”

“... many Czechs believed that the Soviet Union would have rescued them from Hitler if Britain and France had stood firm at Munich. But all that ended in August 1968, with the Soviet-led invasion. After 1968, the Czechs – remembering that Bohemia had once been ‘the heart of Europe’ – looked west with a new passion. The Europe they now longed to ...”

“... In 1923, he published Wind in the Trees, the first of two collections of poems. Later, a trip to France with his father brought revelation: his first sighting of a Monet view of the portals of Rouen Cathedral. Monet and Griggs was to be Piper’s winning combination: gauziness crazed with detail. By then he was articled in his father’s firm, Piper, Smith ...”

“... by their subjection to another religion. Another outbreak of dualist belief occurred in southern France in the 12th century, probably inspired by the Eastern dualism which the Byzantines had fought: these heretics were known as ‘the pure’ – Cathari – or ‘people of Albi’, Albigensians. It took decades of crusading to wipe out their power, and ...”

“... a wish to put him down, much as Glenn Hoddle was always being put down, before being driven off to France. I expect that the same outlook will see to it that the international career of Peter Beardsley, also from the North-East, will soon be reaching a premature end. It is possible to feel that British football and the ...”

“... political structures and means of debating them. The present volume takes us to Italy and Spain, France and England, the Netherlands and Germany, but not to Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Eastern ‘Europe’, or into the vigorous intellectual life of Islam or the East Asian ecumene, where ‘politics’ certainly existed and were theologically or ...”

“... less hierarchical, more robust and manly, was not only different from the civilisations of France or Italy but better? For much of the time, however, the two identities of Paulson’s Hogarth act, or appear to act, with different aims in mind, and in the same image address themselves to two different groups – the polite, and a popular ...”

“... did not. Meanwhile Aboriginals in the bar are listening to a big white man who has fought in France and married a girl from Leicester. He had heard we were surveying sacred sites.   ‘Know the best thing to do with a sacred site?’he drawled.   ‘What?’   ‘Dynamite!’   He grinned and raised his glass to the Aboriginals. The ...”

“... realise that he is, in his modest and quiet way, profoundly altering our views of the past. Like Peter Brown in his studies of late antiquity, he helps to free us from a Rome-centred view of the past, and allows us to recognise that the Eastern Mediterranean was the source of Western culture, and that the art of Ireland, Spain and Norway is as important for ...”