“... 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 ...”

“... Popham, at Westminster, the eleventh day of October in the third year of our reign in England, France, and Ireland, and in Scotland, the thirty-ninth. There was, of course, nothing voluntary about compliance with the writ. From the 16th century onwards, clear warning was given of the consequence of disobedience (‘and this in no wise omit, upon the peril ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”