“... the good manners and the talents of Madame Coswai’. They visited the studios of Jacques-Louis David and of Le Brun, whom Maria found ‘so obliging’ that, as she later confided to her diary, she was almost able to overlook her ‘weak, poor, cheap, common, badly drawn’ work. For her, the most consequential event of the French trip was her meeting with ...”

“... was rendered by Stalin’s linguists as diversiya, Russian for ‘subversion’ or ‘sabotage’. David Reynolds is the author of distinguished works of modern American history, and a master in the art of overcoming wilful or accidental distortions of wartime events and communications. In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War ...”

“... one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The emergence of the compagnonnages – and their relative ubiquity ...”

“... It is entirely symptomatic that she should devote disproportionate space to the work of David Irving, which has little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is ...”

“... said. Ruby felt financially secure, and when her landlord – a woman who lived in the South of France and referred to rental income as ‘my pocket money’ – decided on a whim to sell the house, issuing the occupants with a Section 21 ‘no fault’ eviction notice, the sudden awareness of her structural vulnerability as a tenant came as a shock.Ruby ...”

“... books and the database of slaving voyages compiled in the 1990s by a group of historians headed by David Eltis and Herbert Klein. It ranges from the counting houses of Liverpool and Bristol to the ‘factories’ (slave-trading outposts) of West Africa and the slave markets of the Caribbean. The book is episodic and sometimes confusing. It lacks a clear ...”

“... with the theme of the forest and trees central to the Nazi myth. In a picture recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest, Kiefer paints himself in a white gown, holding a burning branch in a thick forest, the oil layered and dripping as if the work was itself the outcome of a pagan rite. With Kiefer there is always a sense of meanings ...”

“... well as his view of laughter as an aid to sociability; so too did Hutcheson’s pupil Adam Smith. David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth. Some of Hume’s philosophical adversaries, such ...”

“... of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly romances, and David Swale (all too briefly) discusses the limitations of D.H. Lawrence when read in the light of the German Bildungsroman, with its freedom and spiritual adventurousness which is at the same time related to the sense of a given community: these, however, are ...”

“... further behind in the degree to which it is implemented. According to the claims made here, even France, that notorious monument of unaccountable state power qualified only by the unco-operativeness of its citizens, is more liberal in these matters than Britain. Different problems are raised by freedom of information in the two kinds of case. In the ...”

“... beat us with, and pursues the possibility that their weaknesses might be the obverse of our own. David Nettler, the language expert who falls into Oitarian thought patterns, gives a long account of what it is like to enter that alien ‘mindscape’: Somehow the senses – the body – seemed to grow dim, so that it was an inert mechanism, like a corpse ...”

“... global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America – Europe is back!’ In France, Marcel Gauchet, theorist of democracy and an editor of Le Débat, the country’s central journal of ideas, explains, more demurely, that ‘we may be allowed to think that the formula the Europeans have pioneered is destined eventually to serve as a ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... negotiator, said the two sides were ‘still far away’ from an agreement; his UK counterpart, David Frost, admitted there were ‘considerable gaps’. Barnier’s gloomy forecast was that a trade deal was now ‘unlikely’. Barnier hasn’t sounded positive about any of the negotiations he has been involved in since the referendum. The two sides talk ...”