“... international legitimacy and a potentially invaluable ally against England’s traditional enemy, France. For the 16-year-old Catherine, by contrast, marriage to the Prince of Wales in November 1501 must have seemed like a parachute descent to an alien and unappealing planet. She spoke not a word of English, and both she and her entourage found English ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... on a life lived first in Napoleonic – Champollion was born in 1790 – and then Restoration France; who see a need to locate the Louvre every time it is mentioned; and who sink to a new low in asinine anglicisation by turning the Ecole Normale into the Normal School. The book’s one real fault, however, is strategic: inflexibly chronological as it ...”

“... it was recognised that the country could no longer shirk the draconian measures that Germany and France had adopted long before the war began. But the gap between the BEF of 1914 and the conscript army of 1917-18 had been filled by a second force of 2,500,000 volunteers, and it was the fate of this group that gave birth to the ‘lost generation’ myth. The ...”

“... ceremonial bantering of heralds than fighting à l’outrance. Riots in 18th-century England and France also acquired conventional forms, a language of gestures and moves known to the adversaries, and a set of constraining regulations. Social historians have referred to them as ‘collective bargaining by riot’. Conflict in civil society has almost never ...”

“... the difference betwixt a free and an arbitrary country, – between the despotism of the King of France and the despotism of the Parliament of England? It is a solecism in politics, and an absurdity in terms, to say that in a limited Government there can be unlimited Power.’ In the 1770s these had little chance of being anything but minority views. For ...”

“... something that resulted from it. In this Scarisbrick follows contemporary Catholic opinion, and David Starkey has adopted a similar position. Either way, the couple were in for a very long engagement, something almost unknown in the 16th century. It was not until November 1532 that their relationship was consummated, the delays dictated by a most ...”

“... covers the years from 1907 to 1920 or 1921, had been taken down from dictation by the novelist David Plante and was still substantially unrevised. A third section consists of fragments from a diary of the 1940s. The second part is dull by comparison with the first, though the events are interesting enough: a brief period at the Perse School in ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... not enough to confirm the greatness of greatness; we want to know our business with the dead. David Marr unfolds it, steadily, over seven hundred pages. The first vindication of his huge and wonderful book is that it offers ways into all of White’s work, uncovering materials which were taken up and transformed in the making of the novels, the stories ...”

“... he arrives, and he learns to his horror that his mother died in the workhouse. The narrator in David Plante’s The Foreigner is a peeping Tom – twice in the book he experiences orgasm while watching or listening to other people making love – and he tells his story in a detached, remote style which at moments has echoes of Bainbridge’s accomplished ...”

“... of the population. It is worth reflecting on this colossal figure, and on the fact that in France, not atypically in continental Europe, the working class never achieved the 50 per cent mark: the peasantry was simply too big and by the time it had begun to decline, the new middle class had begun to grow. Moreover, the European working classes were ...”

“... Eufemiano Fuentes, the Madrid-based blood doctor who is the Victor Conte of this year’s Tour de France, has claimed that all he is doing is helping his clients perform to their true level in what remains the ultimate endurance-test: not to look after their blood under such circumstances would be irresponsible. Fuentes appears to possess some of Conte’s ...”

“... but at the start of the 19th century it was pretty much the rule – to the extent that France in 1850 legislated to forbid the publication of unsigned articles on philosophical, political and religious subjects. A new book by Eric Barendt, Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics (Hart, £25), traces the contemporaneous voluntary abandonment ...”

“... concentrating on fiction. He has spent most of his adult life outside the UK (in Poland, Italy, France, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand), which may explain why he has been called a contemporary Graham Greene, an epithet which does him few favours, since his prose has little in common with Greene’s and the moral issues that preoccupy him have nothing ...”