“... is the direct source of the phrase, but Milton is also drawing on a speech made by the Princess of France in Love’s Labours Lost: ‘Good wits will be jangling; but, gentles, agree/This civil war of wits were much better used/On Navarre’. The word ‘jangling’ is associated in Milton’s imagination with civil war (the phrase ‘jangling ...”

“... Mackintosh in Glasgow, Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the ...”

“... moment everything is in proportion; the next, sights brighten, outlines sharpen, the scent of a rose becomes monstrous. Frederica, who by the time of Babel Tower has fled the shock of Stephanie’s death into an isolating and brutal marriage with Nigel, eventually breaks free and makes a new life for herself in London. She reads manuscripts and appears on ...”

“... about the same, a little above three thousand. Two weeks later, when Trump was claiming in the Rose Garden that China and the WHO between them had raised the worldwide caseload by a factor of twenty, the number of dead in China had barely budged: the epidemic there was under control. In the US, more than 23,000 had perished. By the time of Azar’s address ...”

“... wrote also to Georgie, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle which Yeats had bought a year earlier. Georgie, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats: I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she will ...”

“... 1915), his first heavyweight novel, and corrected the proofs while serving with the Red Cross in France. There, a few months before Syrie’s pregnancy, he had also met Gerald Haxton, a louche American expatriate who became the most important man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in ...”

“... Yeats wrote​ ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ in the South of France on 13 January 1939, fifteen days before he died. In the poem, the implacable warrior has ‘six mortal wounds’. As he nears death, he moves among the shades. He is the same solitary figure we know from an early Yeats poem, the warrior who ‘fought with the invulnerable tide’, and from plays such as At the Hawk’s Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer ...”

“... observed by satellites, have shrunk by 10 per cent since the late 1960s; the average sea level rose between 0.1 and 0.2 metres during the 20th century (as a result of a combination of the thermal expansion of the warmer oceans and the increased run-off of melt-water). The atmospheric concentration of co2 has increased by 31 per cent since 1750; the present ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”

“... Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son Walter, after serving a full apprenticeship in the Bristol counting house. Even after moving to London with his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter ...”

“... had authentic Europhile connections and antecedents. The Anglo-German Kötting made films in France and escaped whenever he could to a primitive forest house beside an old Cathar track in the Pyrenees. Barton came to Hastings from Paris, and found her inspiration, as the reviewer Nick Hasted said, in ‘charity shop glamour, Gallic chanteuses, Weimar ice ...”

“... of his studio only just sold when Degas and His Model appeared in two parts in Le Mercure de France. An as-told-to by a certain ‘Pauline’, written up in the third person by ‘Alice Michel’, who may have been the novelist ‘Rachilde’ (co-editor and co-founder of Le Mercure), it is not so much kiss-and-tell as pose-and-tell. And it is a curious ...”

“... they held in the Veneto to crush the rebellions in Bologna and Ancona. But, ironically, it was France, a newly formed republic with a constitution committed to defending other republics, which set out to retake Rome for the pope; a French army disembarked at the port of Civitavecchia on 25 April.Thousands gathered to defend the city and the dream of a ...”

“... the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the Iliad. ‘Early rose-fingered dawn’ is mentioned so often in Homer for much the same reason a blues singer might tell you he ‘woke up this morning’: in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who ...”

“... harder to access. I have stood at the site of a Neanderthal shelter at Buoux in the South of France and been hit by an overwhelmingly strong feeling of remoteness, the idea that these people, these similar-but-different humans, were so far from anywhere human and place-like that they must have been hiding from something. Their very existence – we now ...”