“... idea of the modern epoch as the end of civilisation persisted until the Eighties in the work of James Joyce’s former amanuensis, Samuel Beckett. It is implicit indeed in the title of his play, Endgame. The work – today unfashionable – which seemed to authenticate this vision was Spengler’s Decline of the West. Our generation of writers was, very ...”

“... with Dr Coulton is the survival of the rudest.’ Belloc welcomed Mussolini, as he later welcomed Franco. In World War Two he was again a military commentator, although a short-lived one. He became one of a singularly stricken company who lost a son in uniform in both wars. In 1943 he declined Churchill’s offer to propose him for a Companionship of ...”

“... for interrogation by the Guardia Civil having staggered along the Ramblas shouting ‘down with Franco!’ And then in Moscow, as part of a delegation from the National Union of Railwaymen, he managed to slip away on the last evening, ending up in a bar where he met a bunch of high-spiritedly dissident students, in whose company he set off on a vodka ...”

“... in 1911 and since 1936 the Musée Nissim de Camondo. This is the same opening-point chosen by James McAuley for The House of Fragile Things. Both books also end in the same way: by tracing the fate of Renoir’s famous if winsome 1880 portrait of the eight-year-old Irène Cahen d’Anvers, who was later to marry Moïse de Camondo. The two writers tell ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... of a new species in the American landscape, the ‘libertarian intellectual’. Henry James had foreseen the type in The Bostonians in the character of Basil Ransom, proud ex-Confederate contributor to the Rational Review, full of passionate intensity about how to harmonise hierarchy and freedom. The Buckleys’ favoured ideas-and-values man was ...”

“... it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human atmosphere. And it ...”

“... weaponry, to the point where it doesn’t seem extraordinary that a Ukrainian aircraft can fire a Franco-British cruise missile to disable a Russian submarine, or that Ukrainian troops can use American missiles to shoot down Russian rockets. It would have seen Germany go cold turkey on Russian gas and learn to get by without it. Far from Putin stopping the ...”

“... end just seems to disappear into itself. Plante has some reputation. His novel The Ghost of Henry James and his trilogy The Francoeur Family, about a household of French Canadians in America, have found plenty of admirers. In the trilogy, which Chatto have just reissued as a one-volume paperback,* he employs a deadpan, frame-by-frame manner to build up the ...”

“... with dependencies in Sicily and Sardinia. There is a venerable tradition, which hardened under Franco, of treating Castile as if it were the whole of Spain, and Netanyahu’s conception of ‘Spanish nationhood’ is very much centred on Toledo. But it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that the tone for Jewish-Muslim relations was set by the Christians ...”

“... who are supposed to own it? ‘EDF is the biggest electricity company in the world but it is still Franco-French,’ Denis Cohen said, expressing the paradox. ‘The strategy of this company, even though it is Franco-French, is to try to get out of France.’ What matters about EDF’s enormous acquisitions in Britain is not ...”

“... the Yugoslav resistance to Hitler, and Tito’s sudden excommunication seemed inexplicable. James Klugmann, who had served in Yugoslavia during the war, and came back talking enthusiastically of everything there, was – very tactlessly – commissioned by the Party to write a book explaining the volte-face. He could only make the shuffling best of a ...”

“... reaction of European intellectuals to war, to Fascism and to the responsibilities of victory. James Wilkinson gives the two of them a large role in his informative survey of this period of cultural history, and it is salutary to be reminded that confrontation with the reality which had shattered their much-enjoyed freedom of the 1930s was an experience ...”

“... past. ‘To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime,’ Henry James commented, ‘and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne was equally complacent: ‘The final charm,’ he wrote, ‘is bestowed by the malaria . . . For if you . . . stray through these glades in the golden ...”

“... appeared in little magazines, the incessant reader (even on safari), the recipient, like Henry James, of an obscure wound that kept him from the war. Were his stories full of ‘action’ or of ‘love’? Did he sympathise with men or with women? Was he more interested in plot or in character? What did he mean by ‘style’: the way a matador moved in a ...”