“... the Spanish Court in the 17th century any more than Ingres’s can from conditions in 19th-century France. The age makes a contribution, and portrait painters may do so too – I imagine that the way a late 19th-century heiress sat on a sofa was not uninfluenced by Boldini or Sargent – but even the great flatterers had to have something to build ...”

“... the religious poem composed by Marguerite d’Angoulême, the favourite sister of the King of France, which was her 1545 New Year’s gift for Catherine Parr (she was not yet 13!), and which Starkey calls ‘impressive’; and, a year later, her New Year’s gift for her father, her version of Catherine’s own Prayers and Meditations, rendered into ...”

“... way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this ...”

“... brother Joe; awareness of his father’s infidelities and sympathy for him in his quarrels with Rose Kennedy, Jack’s mother; stories about his Fitzgerald grandfather; his mother’s coldness (this gets close to psychobabble); and the general appeal of taking risks. ‘Like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class’, Dallek writes, he ...”

“... and Erich Fromm, some well into the 1960s. By that time, however, structuralism was dominant in France and, despite the friendship Lévi-Strauss and Breton forged in New York, it was no ally to Surrealism. Poststructuralism was even less so. Yet Surrealist traces persist even there. Although Lacan reread Freud through structural linguistics, he was formed ...”

“... inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of food and everything else), they were transported by sea or air or lorry into new near-unmanned ‘flatscapes’ or roll-on-roll-off terminals. Such low-cost ...”

“... party in the pub shook their heads over the technological defeatism of the Americans: the missile rose out of the earth’s atmosphere, steered by four graphite rudders in its slipstream. One hundred kilometres up, it reached the top of an are as neat as the illustration of a parabola in a geometry textbook. You have to pause for a moment, there, as the ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... glacial career testified), whereas the unfashionable engineers had serious peacetime duties, rose faster and could transfer back at a higher rank in the event of war. The ploy worked. MacArthur was never much of an engineer, but he learned the basics of harbours, pontoons and bridges, knowledge which would one day come in handy on remote Pacific ...”

“... pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Brazil etc, but also a consequence of its failure to come up with a new ideological framework to match the new landscape. Many current problems seem likely to grow worse. In 1980, the bottom half of earners in the US took home 20 per cent ...”

“... He held secret talks with China, made a deal of sorts with Libya, struck an agreement with France to purchase a plutonium-reprocessing plant and hired Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist then employed in Holland and now regarded, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as a parent of Pakistan’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear programme which competes with, but does not ...”

“... unappealing to Rabat, which was racking up its external debt with every day the war drew on. France had supported the king, diplomatically and militarily, during the first phase of the takeover and would remain the most obstinate of Morocco’s allies. The US, too, was an important patron and when the Moroccans eventually hit on the idea of a long ...”

“... purchase with the advent of national accounting surveys, first in England around 1700 and later in France. In 1791 Antoine Lavoisier produced estimates of France’s income and wealth and, as Piketty points out with a hint of republican pride, ‘the new tax system established after the Revolution, which ended the privileges ...”

“... great shift of populations within the empire, a process paralleled in the tropical possessions of France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Germany. As the African slave trade ended, ‘free’ or indentured labour was imported to exploit colonial resources and build infrastructure. Chinese workers and their families poured into Malaya to operate its tin mines ...”

“... unlike the England of today, could conceive of … a merry supernaturalism’.‘Shakespeare never rose higher’ than in this play, which with its ‘silliness and violence’ leads us to think the ‘rowdies’ have ‘climbed over the footlights’. This mob rule is offered as the common sense of the man in the pub: ‘If ever the son of a man in his ...”