“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would have been happy with that if it were the Netherlands, Denmark, Scandinavia, perhaps France,’ he said, with sudden intensity of feeling. ‘I thought that was what it was all about. All these Eastern European countries … to try and say “That’s us” is very difficult.’ A patina​ of ancient power, the kind of power that comes with ...”

“... has a history. In the ancient world, the solitude imposed by power was exile; in 17th-century France, the solitude imposed by power was banishment to the countryside. In a modern office, the solitude created by power is a sense of loneliness in the midst of the mass. In the ancient world, the detached dreamer whom the powerful feared was a Socrates, one ...”

“... musketry and manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, the march to Southampton and the night crossing to France in December 1915, the first experience of a long-range heavy shell: these rites of passage are distributed between the flickering personae of In Parenthesis, as a prelude which takes up much of the work. Jones was an infantryman, equidistant from officers ...”

“... trauma of bombing and occupation by Allied powers and their mass expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands, which had eagerly co-operated with the Nazis, wanted to present themselves as part of a valiant ‘resistance’ to Hitlerism. Too many indecent reminders of complicity existed long after the war ended in 1945. Germany ...”

“... picture; in some ways it reinforces it. Thompson’s second target is more consequential. It was Peter Laslett, adopting the techniques of the French historical demographers to the records of obscure English villages of the 17th century, who in 1963 first established what seemed to be the surprising modernity of English village life, at least with respect to ...”

“... concerning them manage to be as much about Schoenberg as anything else. Robert Simpson and Peter Maxwell Davies are given such occluded treatment that one might be forgiven for not recognising them at all. But it is the holes that I deplore. Bach is a pious shadow rather than a solid substance; the rest of the Baroque is altogether absent. So are whole ...”