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“... democracies. The answer: not much. They were willing for their country to sell food to Britain and France – that was about it. The year before, only 5 per cent had supported taking in more refugees. In Kathryn Olmsted’s book The Newspaper Axis, American newspaper owners are shown putting their weight behind isolationism, what William Randolph Hearst ...”

“... promise-crammed with curiosities (one of its chapters is entitled ‘Families, Dogs, Objects’). France is a heated place for psychoanalysis, whose institutional entrenchment is also a state of siege, so the question of Freud’s integrity is especially vexed. Roudinesco is at war with undeclared others who occasionally surface in her intemperate endnotes ...”

“... science and secular philosophy. Everyone agreed that the Enlightenment reached its prime in France in or about the third quarter of the century, and its principal heroes were always referred to as Philosophes. (Philosophy may not have been their strong suit; but the word was left untranslated in deference to the quintessential Frenchness of the whole ...”

“... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... intervention in the economy than we do: the average rate of state subsidy per employed worker in France, Italy and Germany is three to four times higher than it is in Britain. Mrs Thatcher’s solution is to bring their levels down to ours: an alternative solution should be to bring our levels up to theirs. Historically, the ‘problem’ of the British ...”

“... Half a Millennium Later. Was this any kind of site for Utopia, for Acadia, for the founding of New France? Quoyle, protagonist of The Shipping News and newspaper hack in an outport town – a town, that is, which can’t be reached by road – would have sympathised with Cartier. Quoyle is given to thinking about himself in tabloid headlines. He has lived ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... bliss than Thomas Aquinas, in Augustine’s wake, could ever be. Bynum writes in the sphere of Peter Brown’s influence, and is one of the historians who is revising attitudes to Christianity, not from an avowed parti pris (she wasn’t a cradle Catholic and has not converted), but from a desire for intellectual provocation and a brisk contempt for idées ...”

“... in Suffolk on Day 167 of the Sizewell Inquiry. In the huge auditorium, indelibly associated with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Mr Justice Layfield presided over an inquiry the minutes of which were a lawyer’s dream. How they wallowed in it! Every detail of every pipe of every set of tubes seemed to be dissected. I came away doubting whether this form ...”

“... enough, from the Black Death onwards, Europe had been pestilence-ridden; and war had been rife. France, a relatively advanced country, had undergone decimating famines well into the 18th century. Yet this Malthusian trap had finally been sprung: from the beginning of the 19th century the major Western societies had sustained the rising populations without ...”

“... At Albury, the workings of Evelyn’s mind take shape – classical references shading into 1640s France and Italy, reworked in the (momentarily) clear light of Restoration England. Evelyn’s passion for evergreens was one of his major contributions to gardening in general. The North Downs near Wotton, at Leith and Box Hill, were (and are) covered by a pelt ...”

“... sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that flourished in the 18th century. The ...”

“... story was strangely precarious. Although his Two Treatises were published in 1689, they were, as Peter Laslett showed in the 1950s, largely written before it, in the context of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. In the wake of the largely imaginary fears aroused by the Popish Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully ...”