“... in a Continental war, the arrival of Britain’s small army would either be needed to save the French or allowed by the Belgians. Lloyd George learned about the British plans for a warlike intervention on the Continent during the Committee of Imperial Defence meeting on 23 August 1911. Two days later he wrote to Churchill from Criccieth. Professor Gilbert ...”

“... now admired as a kind of wartime reincarnation of Christopher Smart. Gurney trained as a musician, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg as artists; they all served in the ranks and were excluded from the mainstream of literary life after the war – Rosenberg was dead, Gurney mad, Jones given to arcane pursuits. Once again, it was the public school volunteer ...”

“... ago and now reaches us as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France. The French title, with its Gallic abstraction, grandiose and menacing at once, promises much; the English, down-to-earth, sociological, depoliticised, is less portentous, but more specific in its promise, and more frustrating for that. What one might have expected ...”

“... start on a long since redundant decipherment. Their attention has been held, as must that of the French Army pioneers who first came across the Stone in 1799 when doing some spadework in northern Egypt, by the striking density of the signs incised on it – coarsely cut they may be, looked at one by one, but strangely elegant in the mass – and by the ...”

“... had ruled for four centuries. Not because the Turk was brutal, but because Britain, along with its French and Russian allies, coveted the Ottoman domains. Lloyd George wished to acquire two provinces above all: Palestine, on behalf of Jewish Zionists from Europe, for whom the fundamentalist chapel-goer had a messianic sympathy, and Mesopotamia – with Baghdad ...”

“... were, in many significant respects, very different kinds of society. (And both were unlike the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese Empires, which intermittently shared the same Atlantic spaces.) Early modern Spain itself was large, multiethnic, overwhelmingly agricultural and Catholic. Early modern Britain was small, with a growing proto-industrial ...”

“... The might-have-been may offer ‘the perfume of the possible’, as it does for Prendergast in David Lean’s film Brief Encounter. This is quite different from what he calls ‘the cheap fragrance splashed all over’ Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, which becomes Prendergast’s shorthand for feckless or footling counterfactual thinking. He doesn’t want ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... never be comprehended by a single person.’ They also typify the difference between English and French intellectual approaches. The very title of Robb’s Parisians announces that it is going to be based on people rather than thesis or theory; while its craftily alluring subtitle ‘An Adventure History of Paris’ seems to hint at Jules Verne (not that he ...”

“... and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to secondary school, I was ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... he learned or taught himself several modern languages, and was particularly strong in German and French. He claimed to understand eight languages and, as Joyce said, he made a liberal parade of his learning: ‘He has read recklessly in many literatures, crossing how many seas, and even penetrated into Peristan, to which no road leads that the feet ...”

“... too remained in segregated enclaves. In fact, I doubt whether we can find any places before the French Revolution, except for small refugee communities in France and the Netherlands and the ancient communities in Northern Italy and the South of France, where the totality of Jews, and not merely the elite, were integrated into the surrounding ...”