“... with the desire to find the laws governing them. The British took the Rosetta Stone, but allowed France to keep Geoffroy, as well as his collection of crocodiles, ichneumons, and mummified ibises, which he had threatened to burn rather than cede to the victors. Geoffroy was one of nature’s romantics: ostensibly a descriptive anatomist, he investigated the ...”

“... a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the past, though, when he plays down its connections with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... So he argues that St Bernard of Clairvaux represented the new scholastic learning of Peter Abelard as pedantry, which encouraged ‘curiosity, novelty and a dangerous reliance on human reason’, while ‘the figure of the humanist pedant developed into a negative stereotype that highlights the antisocial characteristics of these learned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts ...”

“... he seems to have worked hardest on it in 1610-12. In 1610 the assassination of Henry IV of France, the death of Archbishop Bancroft and the weakening of Cecil’s supremacy at court wrought a change in the complexion of English politics that may provide the most helpful context for an understanding of the ‘life’. From that year until his death in ...”

“... understanding of philosophy among those who would be canvassed under the title Philosophy in France Today. While commendable for its intention of giving a more inclusive picture of French thought, this title is misleading because the selection of ‘great men’ is not impartially representative. For one thing, the variety of French work in logic and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had moved permanently to France. Every inch of interior wall had been covered in murals by a young French painter, against which Lourié looked finally at home. He had been one of Akhmatova’s ‘husbands’ for a while. Tenuous communication had not diminished their emotional ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”