“... so many cases) to mutilation and death, does not allow us to forget that, but for the war with France, civil war might have led to worse horrors, that Henry’s options are few. All of this Anne Barton gets right. She fully understands the ideological context, the background of quasi-mythical expectations, but she does not flatten Shakespeare into an inert ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... interventions were put-up jobs, but apparently honour was satisfied. Following the Revolution in France, the fear of popular radicalism in Britain, and the supposed need to protect the king from republican assassins, redefined the runners’ role and further increased their visibility among the general public. By 1794 the runners were working for the Home ...”

“... his people’s identity. It was a bestseller in Israel and won the Prix Aujourd’hui in France. Eric Hobsbawm called it a ‘much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth’. Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, aims to trace the concept of a Jewish homeland from the vague territorial references of the ...”

“... admiringly in the poem he addresses to Wordsworth, meaning that his friend had actually been in France during the Revolution, ‘thine own brows garlanded,/Amid the tremor of a realm aglow’. In this respect you can see Shelley’s great and fruitful friendship with Byron as a genuine meeting of admiring antitypes. Shelley dosed Byron with the elevated ...”

“... the living-room floor, jobs (and failing to get jobs), holidays (family packages to the South of France and Morocco figure prominently as the outer limits of the exotic). Since Larkin and Douglas Dunn’s Terry Street, the landscape of Kingston-upon-Hull has come to look like Grantchester, Adlestrop and far Araby all rolled into one. It crops up twice in ...”

“... conference on refugees in 1936 and careful to make no commitments at a similar conference in France two years later. A pattern began to emerge in the Irish handling of the refugee problem. The Department of Justice was inflexible and would only bend under direct pressure from the Taoiseach’s office, and the Taoiseach’s office dealt only with cases ...”

“... God (‘you have rendered my whole life a failure,’ his father said) and fleeing first to France and Davos then to America and the Pacific, miles away from the reek of penitence and the Scottish rain. It looks as though Stevenson was forced into being an adventurer by the weakness of his constitution, but one of the efficiencies of Claire Harman’s ...”

“... plant, while the German tutor she sees on her travels is a duck: Of course, while in Romantic France I met with Cupid and Romance. One glimpse at my rejected suitor – He was a handsome German tutor. But no! I would be no man’s wife … More appealing is a ‘dear friend’ she meets in the Tuileries: With flowers and little birds galore She quenched ...”

“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”

“... of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays ...”

“... both intellectually and organisationally, and they constituted a source of rivalrous curiosity in France, especially after the defeat of 1871, but they had considerable impact in Britain, too, not least in standing for an ideal of wissenschaftlich ‘research’ which came to be grafted onto the native traditions of teaching and scholarship. In the first ...”

“... and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were moved to Poland, followed in September by Curly Wurly, and in December by Chomp, Fudge, Picnic and Double Decker. ‘We watched the last few Double Deckers go through,’ said ...”

“... and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished dialect. Peter, my boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) driver, is Ugandan; for although the major businesses here all belong to government ministers and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ...”