“... 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 ...”

“... simple task appeared to be beyond many local officials. John Rickman, who, following the lead of France and the United States, had dreamed up the idea of a nationwide head count and persuaded Parliament to back it, described the enumerators as men ‘who answer plain questions with much sincerity, but to whom difficult questions cannot be propounded without ...”

“... are to be found in other national literatures as well, including those of Catholic France, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. There are also non-puritan tributaries feeding into streams of American and Scottish literature that can account for some of these features. Indeed, they seem almost archetypically transcultural. If the nightmares of a ...”

“... half-crust. (“That bread alone was worth the journey,” they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.)’ This provoked disdain and wrath on the Letters page, and a response from Angela in the shape of a postcard from Austin, Texas. On the front was a picture of a ...”

“... of farting in a space vehicle. Richard Olney, an American expert on food and wine who has lived in France since 1951, has many qualities, but humour is not one. The second and revised edition of The French Menu Cookbook contains the same catholic selection of recipes as the first, but has additional material in its very instructive introductory section on menu ...”

“... benefited from the pioneering work of his friend Emilia Pattison, whose Renaissance of Art in France – an example of the new discipline of art history – was published in 1879.This new Pater, cosmopolitan and engaged, is much more to our taste than the caricatural aesthete. But it would be just to acknowledge that Pater believed in the fine ...”