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“... technological revolution was in full (if retrospectively feeble) blast, and when British, French and Americans were replanning and rebuilding their cities with the limitless funds and buoyant optimism of big-spending liberal governments, Olsen’s argument was one to which official ears were largely deaf. For if his history of the well-run and ...”

“... his search places his book in an earlier tradition, preserved in certain schools of German and French philosophy and in the psychology of Freud. However, the spirit in which the choice is made is very British. We could imagine G.E. Moore proving the existence of the internal world by helping himself to it in this sensible way. Certainly, this is very ...”

“... at Vichy is a real-time, one-act play about a group of arrested Jews in the waiting-room of a French police station in 1942. It has been criticised for both the speechifying and the over-neat plotting of its closing section (an aristocratic gentile arrested by mistake hands on his pass to one of the other prisoners, who escapes). Critics have tended to ...”

“... conviction that cleanliness is next to godliness, Sutherland believes, by the influence of his French mother. Similarly, Woloch’s emphasis on irony as commitment can help us to get a better grip on one of the most compelling themes of Orwell’s 1940s political journalism: its critique of the ruthlessness of ‘perfectionist ideology’ (the phrase is ...”

“... below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War of Independence. I know it was 152 feet long, weighed 998 tonnes and carried 42 guns. But at the time this replica was created in 1975, I ...”

“... of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to be, in the 1790s, republicans and advanced reformers, who then suffered disappointment in the course of the French Revolution and, in different ways and at ...”

“... European literature,’ wrote David Dabydeen in his essay ‘On not being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, ‘is littered with blacks like Man Friday, who falls to earth to worship Crusoe’s magical gun, or the savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... even further away? Eight years later, in the Deheisha refugee camp on the occupied West Bank, David Grossman experienced a faintly similar phenomenon. He was listening to an old Palestinian woman remembering her past, in the village of Ain Azrab, baking bread over a straw fire, the woman all the time unconsciously working her fingers through the motion of ...”

“... with their first league title for 50 years. Barclay talks to a number of other coaches, including David Moyes of Everton, who originally believed that Mourinho had made himself a hostage to fortune by his blind faith in his ability to shape his own destiny: ‘The initial feeling was that you just couldn’t display that kind of arrogance in this country and ...”

“... parts subsequently appeared in English (in the American journal Telos) in 1986, and the whole in French in 1992 and in Spanish in 1993. Interest in Schmitt’s notions of political theology, sovereignty and the ‘state of exception’ was sufficient among political and cultural theorists (including the likes of Derrida and Zizek) to motivate the publication ...”

“... and went in the first weeks of December tried to get beds in a hotel called the Fransuski Dom, or French House, which was a comfortless former apartment building which – until the attacks came closer – preserved a functioning restaurant and a few electric fires (the central heating had long since ceased to work). The unlucky found places in the nearby ...”

“... Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Doctorow grew up on Eastburn Avenue, in the Bronx. His mother was a pianist and his father had a store in ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”

“... assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in the case of Jacques Tati, have a ruthless control freak or incurable melancholic on his hands, although even his book contains one or two tales of debts unpaid, employees exploited and lapses into despair. (A very small price to pay for ...”