“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a vague 19th-century ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... big one might not necessarily work. Sometimes the judges prefer you to pull out the small one. In France, on the other hand, prize novels are more likely to be successfully written to a formula. Over there, members of literary juries continue remorselessly in power until their ink dries; some judges double as literary advisers in publishing houses; and there ...”

“... obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are distortions. Neither is this a matter of crude ‘equating’: of setting out to prove that the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was as important as it was in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all European aristocracies before the modern ‘demographic explosion’. In the Loire region of France, for example, 66 of the 215 lineages with a claim to noble status in 1200 had disappeared by the end of the 13th century because the male line had become extinct, another 80 went in the next century, and 38 more in the 15th. Or, to cite another ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... At the end of the 18th century the main threat to British possession of India seemed to come from France. In Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He had corresponded with Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, and talked of leading the French expeditionary force on to conquer the British possessions in India ...”

“... centuries in English or (during the earlier part of the period when, she points out, England and France formed a single cultural entity) in Anglo-Norman and French. What was going on during the same period in Italy, Germany or Spain falls outside the scope of Cooper’s inquiry. More puzzling is the omission of certain classical Greek and Latin texts ...”