“... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...”

“... a scholarship more than adequate for his needs, and spent the summer of 1936 tramping around France and Spain. By the time he showed up at Cambridge that autumn, he was already unusual: in his knowledge, range, languages, Continental connections, political commitments (he joined the party at this point) and, frankly, intellectual confidence. Still ...”

“... system, least of all with representative government, as nowadays in England, America and France it seems popular to believe.On such grounds Waugh accounted for the decline of Britain and the decay of her empire in Augustinian terms. The whole world was so sunk in original sin that by no act of their own will could men change things for the ...”

“... matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who’s had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the notorious Papin sisters – real-life models for the homicidal domestics in Genet’s The Maids – disembowelled their bourgeois mistress and her daughter in a fit of bestial frenzy after the unfortunate Mme Lancelin complained once too often ...”

“... to indicate the range of these findings: the probable mediation of Edouard Drumont, author of La France juive, in the genesis of the Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the hidden links of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique; and the presence of Georges Bataille in the composition and character of ...”

“... pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Brazil etc, but also a consequence of its failure to come up with a new ideological framework to match the new landscape. Many current problems seem likely to grow worse. In 1980, the bottom half of earners in the US took home 20 per cent ...”

“... prophesied the production of the first ‘ectogenetic’ (i.e. extra-uterine) child, in 1951. ‘France,’ he goes on to fantasise,was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal Bull ‘Nunquam prius ...”

“... down, have just emerged from a railway station. The dead are scattered, unburied, unclaimed in France and Belgium. War memorials are not in place, not yet, to remind Eliot’s city workers of what they have lost: fathers, brothers, sons. Publishing the pain, cataloguing the names (without vulgar forensic detail), was a necessary ritual of ...”

“... playing a kind of burlesque version of themselves. These are men like the braggadocio Peter Shakerly; the railer Charles Chester, who was the model for Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious ...”

“... Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, in which the journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée pick through a cache of documents, released to them by the CIA, that confirms the long extant rumour of the agency’s role in publishing the text in Russian.2 This rumour had already been investigated (it took him twenty years) by ...”

“... principal voiceover, is a priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem). Marina and Neil fall in love in France. ‘We climbed the steps,’ Marina says in voiceover as they visit the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel on the coast of Normandy. There is an inserted shot of their hands clasping. As they arrive at the cloister, she finishes the sentence: ‘to the ...”

“... he said, had been ‘cleansed in the blood’ of the young men who’d been ‘sacrificed’ in France. Nicholas Mosley, disposed to be loyal to his father whenever he decently can be, but more interested in the legend he created than the policies he stood for, takes over the details of his father’s career in large part from the faithful Skidelsky. Thus ...”

“... of Aids, but also, confusingly, that ‘I do not know of any haemophiliac with Aids in the UK, France or Germany. I do not think we need to get overconcerned about this.’ A few days later, Slater returned to the hospital with a swollen testicle and a host of other problems. ‘Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome new’ was written in his medical ...”

“... Michelet and Taine on what they variously regarded as the glorious or inglorious revolution in France in 1789 (Burrow can’t contain his relish for the Old Testament thunderings of Carlyle, on whom his chapter is quite brilliant, any more than his distaste for the relentless Taine). He also discusses the imaginative celebrations of England’s communal ...”

“... from around Crieff, while units of Irish Piquets and Royal Ecossais mercenaries had arrived from France.The daring Jacobite plan was to do a night march to Cumberland’s encampment at Nairn and surprise the enemy while they were still in camp, dozy and hungover, it was assumed, after celebrating Cumberland’s birthday. A good idea, which failed because of ...”