“... expected to lie awake pondering the logical status of such propositions as ‘the present king of France is bald.’ Despite his dependence on women he accused the whole sex of ‘triviality of soul’. In his letters he spoke copiously and freely to a great many correspondents. It is hard to read the dozens of amorous effusions here quoted without some ...”

“... from the authorities in more than one country, and ended up in Mexico; Wolff was arrested in France in 1943 after the Germans took control of the unoccupied zone, but died in hospital before he could be transported to Auschwitz. Other exiled journalists tried to scrape a living in countries they didn’t know, often producing low-circulation and not very ...”

“... my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our daughter Candy was already three months old.’ Peter Pan had the windows locked against him when he tried to go home and saw a new baby in his cot; at least they let Patrick in. But Johnnie was a journalist and six weeks after Patrick arrived, his paper sent him to Paris. ‘I went too but we left the ...”

“... a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War ...”

“... tribus began to appear too, as did denials on the part of those accused of writing them, including Peter Arpe, who nevertheless admitted to having ‘held … in his hand’ De tribus. At some point between 1712 and 1716, a forged letter from Frederick II to Otto of Bavaria began to circulate, purporting to confirm the 13th-century origins of the (in fact ...”

“... patients in Budapest’s two Jewish hospitals. It is worth noting the contrast between Hungary and France, where Jews stood a much better chance of survival, despite a much longer period of German occupation. In depicting the occupation as an assault by a monstrous Nazi eagle on an angelic Hungarian nation, the monument on Liberty Square grossly distorts the ...”

“... his house, Gad’s Hill, and his offices in London, between London and unidentified villages in France where Ternan lived with her mother, between home and lengthy, exhausting reading tours throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. His heart was failing, his swollen left foot was hurting, and he zigzagged between the highs of cheering audiences ...”

“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... been partially put into effect in Marseille, shortly after the Germans invaded the Free Zone of France in November 1942.* The Nazis abominated the mixture of races they found in the narrow alleyways and tenements of the area immediately north of the Vieux Port. It was a ‘pigsty’, and was demolished at the beginning of 1943 on Himmler’s orders. To ...”

“... bemusement and indifference. Historians such as Christopher Haigh, Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall have reconstructed a social world of coexistence between people of different faiths, who lived what Haigh once called ‘an ambidextrous religious life’. This inclination to ‘get along and get by’ was exported to the New World along with the ...”

“... an improviser, he oversaw economic growth per capita between 1997 and 2010 which exceeded that of France, Germany and the United States – and far exceeds Britain’s feeble growth rate since then. He almost halved the number of children living in poverty, and after his administration the elderly were no longer poorer on average than other Britons. He pushed ...”

“... like this – Wilfred Owen’s was not dissimilar: away to Oxfordshire, away teaching in France long before enlistment – is that they exacerbate sibling tensions, intolerance, even dislike. Given the hopelessly misdated or undated state of Gurney archives at the time he was writing his book, Michael Hurd’s The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978), the ...”

“... tradition, Goethe and Schiller, but unlike its sterner English precedents in Westminster Abbey (Peter Scheemakers, 1741) and Stratford (Ronald Gower, 1888), this is a portrait of the writer who circulated sugared sonnets among his private friends. Lessing’s Shakespeare half-sits on his plinth, one foot off the ground, looking quizzically to one side as if ...”

“... be the rightful heir to the Scottish throne. After 1915, when he landed an administrative job in France with the Royal Horse Artillery, Bernard’s military pretensions intensified. But he began to feel cash-strapped during the postwar slump. The house in Hove was sold and the family entered the dilapidated sub-world of boarding houses and hotels that became ...”

“... the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the financial and Naval machinery of ...”