“... operational commander. His contempt for Anderson, Commander of First Army (a British army but with French and American corps besides), became ever more stridently expressed as the two armies came together under one Army Group command. First Army had been built up in Tunisia after the TORCH landings, and Monty had already been scathing about what he had heard ...”

“... children’s newspaper Il Giornale per i bambini in 1881, Collodi had published a translation of French fairy tales of the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of them by Charles Perrault, with others by Mme D’Aulnoy and Mme Leprince. The collection included ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ...”

“... foreign correspondent, once asked Mao Tse-tung for his appraisal of the social implications of the French Revolution. Mao reflected a while and then, shaking his head, said: ‘I think it’s still a bit too early to tell.’ The late Chinese leader’s caution might seem excessive even to the most obsessive historians. In today’s hurried ...”

“... writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like ...”

“... model, alongside the immense architectural and urban pangs of the new Berlin, and the unique French ville-nouvelle format. It is a view from Europe where North America is omnipresent yet largely absent, and one which offers a focus on individual buildings without coming down on the side of any traditional opposition between architecture and ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an ...”

“... Egyptian abstemiousness. In a short while he had all the usual one-incident pick-ups, most of them French trade, and at least one affair in which the affections if not the heart were touched.’ ‘At parties, at bars, in New York or wherever he travelled, there was the expectation of erotic excitement, of one-night or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely ...”

“... Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger later attended Stonyhurst College; the Claimant was barely literate. The best that could be said for him was that he waggled his eyebrows in a way that reminded his ...”

“... Awkward Age (1899), which turns on the heroine’s violation of a similar taboo with an unnamed French novel. A book that didn’t get read is a rarity in these memoirs, however. And not just books, but pictures, periodicals, stage performances of every kind: all feed an appetite for representation that appears to have been every bit as eager – and to ...”

“... interests prevailing over those of a larger, more distant authority. In the late 19th century, the French planned to link the Tunisian chotts (salt lakes) of the Northern Sahara with the Mediterranean. A vast inland sea in southern Tunisia and along the southern edge of the Aurès mountains in Algeria would have facilitated trade and troop movements in ...”

“... mythmaking, as a result of which a large gap emerged between what this country actually did in the French wars and what it perceived itself to be doing. The wars of the 1790s were the first to be waged between political ideologies. The British fought on the side of the legitimists against Jacobinism, yet ideologically – for all the philippics of Burke and ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... an argument popular in the 1880s but less powerful in the postwar period. He couldn’t forgive David Lloyd George, then prime minister, for negotiating with Irish republicans. ‘The surrender to the murder gang in Ireland is going to have a deplorable and very immediate effect on Palestine, Egypt and India,’ he warned in 1921. Ronan McGreevy’s new ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... parts of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses and that some of the psalms were not composed by David … Paine took particular pleasure in some of the Bishop’s curious admissions. For example, The Age of Reason questioned whether God really commanded that all men and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered and their maidens ...”