“... profane – that confirmed his vocation. The first came when he was 11 years old, on vacation in France to visit his French father’s family. There was a vichyssoise on the Queen Mary. It was cold and it was good, and he remembered it. On arrival, his normal American patterns asserted themselves, and he reverted to steak haché, frites and ‘Coca’. The ...”

“... the ‘realistic status’ of the literary property-holder (particularly, one may note, in France, where the author, unlike his Anglo-American colleague, has a moral right in law). is thus the index of intransigent and triumphant counter-revolution. Not surprisingly, a nucleus of young British post-structuralists have drifted towards Marxist activism ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”

“... for Afro-Asian solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently independent African states – Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea – and gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and ...”

“... that she was writing a novel and that it was about a young man’s adventures in the South of France, her mother had apparently said: ‘I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’ (‘Billi’ was what her family called the young Sybille.) ‘God forbid, mummy,’ Billi replied. But mummy was sure of her ground: ‘One ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... Proust, and he counted it his first novel. He took to the life of a wandering reporter, visiting France and Russia, Poland, Albania and Germany for his papers, and writing them up in long series of articles. He drank, and cultivated a casual grand manner. To an accompanying hack he claimed to be writing for ‘posterity’, and when an angry wire from ...”

“... wrecking the economy? It looked hopeless. In his fine book The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (2009), David Welsh asked: ‘How could two such opposed organisations as the ANC and the NP ever hope to reach a constitutional settlement, given their respective histories, their radically different constitutional proposals, and a serious difference of opinion over the ...”

“... created a genuinely ‘national’ government just as the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. Churchill’s relations with the Tories were difficult, and for a moment he seemed to stand above party, with a cabinet that included the party leaders: Clement Attlee of Labour; Sir Archibald Sinclair of the Liberals; and Chamberlain himself, who was ...”

“... fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed. In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin ...”

“... that the two new republics, both of them imperilled by the great Catholic monarchies of Spain and France, should make common cause? Early in 1651 an English embassy to the Hague seemed likely to seal such an alliance. Yet the negotiations ended in acrimony, and the following year the two republics went to war. Since that war seems to make neither religious ...”

“... Christ, but appears to have no doubt that many of the doctrines preached by the Catholic Church in France were either incredible or wicked or both. Rousseau was, in Emile as elsewhere, hard on the doctrine of Original Sin. It was his lifelong conviction that man came from the hands of God innocent and happy, and that society made him depraved and ...”