“... Swinton was instructed by Kitchener, whom he had known in South Africa, to travel immediately to France as an official Eyewitness and write a series of reports to be sent directly to Kitchener as Secretary of State for War: having forbidden normal press coverage of the war, Kitchener would decide whether to authorise publication or not, as he saw fit. In any ...”

“... of Arran, arrived in England from the Continent. The phrase reads that if Mary (then living in France) did not accept what Cecil considered a reasonable solution to the Scottish revolt, ‘then humbly they [the Scottish Parliament] may commit the governaunce thereof to the next heir of the crown’ – effectively Arran. Cecil’s acceptance of the power ...”

“... put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked natives’?If Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in ...”

“... of the opposite sex. Mrs Moore was the mother of a fellow cadet, and the two boys, before going to France, agreed that Clive – who never used his own Christian name but was known as ‘Jack’ – would ‘look after’ her should her son be killed. Her son was killed, and it is possible, even likely, that Jack’s relationship with her would have developed ...”

“... the export of Poussin’s paintings (including the Phocion pictures themselves) from Rome to France corresponds to the gathering and return of Phocion’s ashes. Both Poussin and Phocion were, it seems, accorded recognition only in their absence, and the paintings reflect this by taking as their subject the absent body of the general, which appears first ...”

“... political structures and means of debating them. The present volume takes us to Italy and Spain, France and England, the Netherlands and Germany, but not to Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Eastern ‘Europe’, or into the vigorous intellectual life of Islam or the East Asian ecumene, where ‘politics’ certainly existed and were theologically or ...”

“... all the many commentators in the West who had something to say about the Hebron events, only one, David Shipler of the New York Times, made a connection between Baruch Goldstein, political Judaism and Zionism itself. All of them, he said correctly, are aspects of each other: they can’t be broken up into smaller, separate units called ‘single deranged ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... the post-war order which swathes the whole of Northern Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... Alberto​ Giacometti (b.1901) had his first postwar show in France at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1951. From 1941 to 1945, he had been stranded in his native Switzerland, working on tiny sculptures that he brought back to Paris – so the story goes – in matchboxes. He had started scaling up since then, creating the austere works in plaster and bronze for which he’s now remembered ...”

“... be vastly more popular than the great string quartets, and so on; and this is especially true in France, for reasons that we cannot fathom.’ Sutcliffe quotes Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who described Haydn as the composer whom ‘concert promoters have always regarded as box office death, even if true musicians have a passion for him almost beyond any other ...”

“... belongs to that group of writers – T.E. Lawrence in this country, St Exupéry and Malraux in France, D’Annunzio in Italy – who created their personalities out of their reading and then acted out these literary personalities. The difference was that he was also a practical man. John Buchan started as a writer, and even while he was trying to scale the ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... by experiments with blind, deaf and feral children, special schools were set up, first of all in France. The great pioneer was Edouard Séguin, who, like so many others, sailed off to the New World to realise his utopian dreams. ‘Families’ of defectives, headed by valiant, paternalistic pedagogues, could, he believed, be disciplined into ...”