“... and perhaps novel about Rupert is that he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply ...”

“... same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos (1813) and St Peter’s sweaty forehead in The Vision of Judgment (1822). There are some uniquely ill-judged moments in the early work, unmatched by anything in the later (‘And therefore came I, in my bark of war,/To smite the smiter with the scimitar,’ Conrad the pirate ...”

“... with papers of record such as the national gazettes circulating state-approved news. In 1703, Peter the Great established Vedomosti, the first printed newspaper in Russian, though six decades later Russian officials grumbled that the propaganda power of a state media organ was not being realised, since copies of the paper ‘are not received in all towns ...”

“... she might well have died. Towards the end of September, they finally persuaded her to return to France with them.This became a recurring pattern. Weil acted on conviction, always with great courage and absolute determination. But in the background, her parents were ready to drop everything to make sure that she survived her attempts at living out her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years later, it is an abrupt, allusive yarn about a group of English officers and men in northern France near the end of the First World War; and it is narrated by one of them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and died in Beverly Hills in 1976. He made 17 films in Germany before leaving in 1933, one film in France in 1934, and 24 films in the US between 1936 and 1956. He directed his three last films in Germany. But even tyrannical directors need a lot of help, and I take ‘Fritz Lang’ to mean not only a historical person but also whatever controlling spirit we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1956, its assets impounded and its members pursued through the courts. Unlike in Italy or France, Germany’s social democrats had no rivals on the left. When Willy Brandt took office in 1969 as the first postwar SPD chancellor, he did so in coalition with the liberal, free-market FDP. The coalition governments of Brandt and Helmut Schmidt changed the ...”

“... 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 ...”