“... somewhat less at ease with texts, Professor Goffen is at her best when, following the example of David Rosand, she discusses the relation of the paintings to their physical context in the Frari, emphasising what it might be convenient to call their ‘intermonumentality’: in other words, the way in which they echo, quote or refer to other images in the ...”

“... Rzecki records everything he hears about the prospective Napoleon IV, who escaped from France after his father’s fall in 1870 and went on to become a graduate of the Woolwich Military Academy. The Prince’s death in the Zulu campaign of 1879 is a sad blow to the old clerk. Rzecki’s diary is, in some respects, an ominous document. He reminds us ...”

“... piece about national intelligence agencies, and the following year, a homage to Pierre Mendès France, one of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a hundred pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl ...”

“... then manipulated by entrepreneurs angling for contracts and subsidies. That certainly happened in France, where Colbert’s friends and relations collected most of the taxes and then dished out the proceeds to their own businesses. Samuel Daliès de la Tour, for example, was not only chief tax collector for the Dauphiné but also a big supplier of timber and ...”

“... in his Bromley and Chislehurst constituency. A couple of months earlier, another Conservative MP, David Morris, apologised for lobbying on behalf of an energy firm that had given him £10,000. Morris had urged the energy minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, to lobby Ofgem to change regulations in ways that could benefit Aquind Limited, which is seeking to build an ...”

“... about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an ...”

“... only strengthened the cult of Marat. In his funeral procession, hastily arranged by Jacques-Louis David, Marat’s bathtub was carried through Paris by members of the Society of Revolutionary Women, and his corpse (bathed in aromatics to disguise the stench) was shouldered by a dozen men. Weeks later his heart was placed in an urn looted from the Tuileries ...”

“... opening pages of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh discoveries arrive, the most striking ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... rather than a genre novel), Dirty Snow. The book was written in the US in 1948: Simenon had left France after being accused of collaborating with the German occupation. He had allowed a Nazi-run film company to adapt his novels, and one had been turned into anti-Semitic propaganda. His younger brother, Christian, had been condemned to death for collaboration ...”

“... UN agencies, trade-union bodies, student and youth associations. My plan was to visit France briefly, but I stayed nearly ten years. For anyone living in Paris, the Algerian war was inescapable. Where did your sympathies lie? Which side were you on? In 1960 at an international youth conference in Accra, I struck up a friendship with the two ...”

“... early 17th centuries. Against the grim background of protracted civil war in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany, Neostoicism offered a philosophy of fortitude and consolation not merely to intellectuals but to princes and statesmen. It was a philosophy for laymen, who found in pagan literature a restorative retreat from the conflicting ideologies of ...”

“... the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing intensity of events after Runnymede and the hectic pace of them. Within days of its sealing, engrossments of the Charter were ...”

“... few decades, through the publication of multi-volume national histories of the book (1982-86 in France, ongoing in Britain and elsewhere); through the efforts of a professional society with a prominent journal (Book History), a hyperactive discussion list (sharp-l@listserv.indiana.edu), and an overstuffed website (www.sharpweb.org); and eventually through ...”