“... ale, CND, the Goons) while the Mods had a magpie eye for European style, from the Tour de France to the Nouvelle Vague. Trads followed Acker Bilk, Mods worshipped Thelonious Monk: even at fifty years’ remove, you can see how sharing the same club, city or country might have been problematic. If the Oxbridgey Trads had a philosophical pin-up it was ...”

“... potentially difficult day as it’s also the day of the Grand Slam rugger match between Wales and France. The train is very crowded and he sits in Weekend First next to a middle-aged French couple who he assumes to be fans, but with nothing in their behaviour that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives at Cardiff the very proper bourgeois lady ...”

“... or selfish unreliability. He was huge in Switzerland, big in Germany and well known in France, but he never cracked the United States – Al Gore met him when he was a senator, but as vice president was always too busy. He was an inspiring speaker with a simple and achievable message: avoid all tropical wood and palm oil products, choose local ...”

“... from rice and 281 calories from sugar and other sweeteners. In some countries, such as Turkey and France, per capita wheat consumption is a great deal higher and in others, such as Cameroon (where maize is the staple food) or the Philippines (rice), much lower. But it’s striking that wheat consumption has been increasing fast since the 1960s, even in ...”

“... abstraction. It slots him into a ‘cookie-cutter modernist narrative of marching styles’, as Peter Schjeldahl put it. But the appearance of relentless progress in Mondrian’s art sometimes disguised uncertain forward leaps and backtrackings, like the careful deletions and proof marks he made on the letters he wrote in English. His reinventions involved ...”

“... Leibovitz properly discomfited, though I shouldn’t think she’ll remain so for long. 24 July, France. Walking through Lectoure with Lynn we go down a back street towards the car park. It’s hot and already the lunch break; the houses are shuttered and the street completely deserted. We are passing a house that is being renovated with Lynn slightly ahead ...”

“... in trying to protect Britain from a breakdown in food supply (a far more remote possibility in France and the US, where old statist habits persist). Defra believes it’s time to arrest the decline of farming capacity. It wants more young people to consider farming as a livelihood and landowners to lease to people who’d like to grow food. Four months ...”

“... you can do about it.’ What unites Powell, Pavey and Witts? If a visitor from 18th-century France were to spend time in Tewkesbury, and if he were asked to describe a new Three Estates for the town and English towns like it, he might reasonably conclude that Tewkesbury was divided between public servants, private servants and localists. Powell, Pavey ...”

“... a year before the old life so shockingly blew away – I made a long-contemplated trip to France and Belgium to see the cemeteries of the First World War. My quest, though transatlantic, was a modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of ...”

“... resources and surveillance time monitoring such well-known left-wing subversives as Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson, as well as CND and Vietnam War protesters. More important, from a counter-terrorist perspective, it was deeply involved in the British state’s confrontation with modern Irish Republican terrorism. Until 1992, the Met Special Branch had sole ...”

“... But knowledge of his power is clearly present in the scenes where he woos Katherine of France in Henry V and Lady Anne in the film of Richard III. (It may even be there in his night scenes with his army before Agincourt.) The strongest, because most casual, evidence I saw him give of knowing it was in The Master Builder at the National Theatre in ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction ...”

“... if it was not up to the highest standards. Veyne no doubt owes his chair in the Collège de France to his Classical scholarship, even though it is for his work as a social theorist that he will achieve classic status. The central problem, to which Veyne offers a suitably complex answer, is that of explaining the institution of evergetism. Veyne ...”

“... historical frame, above all the Catholic triumphalism manifested in Bernini’s colonnades for St Peter’s piazza or in the impeccably prim altarpieces of Carlo Maratta, the president of the Accademia di San Luca. And so little moved forward in the fractured Italy of those days. Rich families vied for the papacy; loyalties inclined to this or that ...”

“... Salvini of the Lega Nord in Italy and Marine Le Pen of the renamed Rassemblement National in France ultimately back away from any talk of exit from the EMU. Once the single currency was in force, people’s savings were held in euros. To leave the Monetary Union when this was an accomplished fact was to destroy their value. No party with a popular base ...”