“... of view that combines the frustration of all those viewers (a billion watched the Final between France and Brazil last summer), and by reference to which Jones’s pleas for rescue can be reasonably rejected – or even be counted unreasonable. If, on the other hand, Jones could be rescued immediately only by a manoeuvre that would kill Smith, also pinned ...”

“... Christopher Brown’s Images of a Golden Past: Dutch Genre Painting of the 17th Century and Peter Sutton’s exhibition catalogue, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Genre Painting, both appeared in 1984.) The text is supplemented with nearly 250 images, many in colour, as well as more than forty pages of triple-column notes and an extensive ...”

“... in social issues, and he used sex in his writings as a way of describing power relations. As Peter Wagner demonstrated in Eros Revived (1988), politicised pornography was an 18th-century commonplace. Sade’s pornography, as one would expect from a man who so calamitously lacked the power to refrain, is boringly exaggerated. The interminable and ...”

“... massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger later attended Stonyhurst College; the Claimant was barely literate. The best that could be said for him was that he waggled his eyebrows in a way that reminded his supporters of Roger. Nor was ...”

“... books. Prescott failed the 11-plus and is stinging about the experience. His father came back from France an amputee and thereafter became an accomplished cadger and skiver, an energetic seeker of free admission and free drinks; also a trade-union official and a JP. Prescott had next to no education, and left school at 15 to work in hotels, before getting a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”