“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of this reflex occurred some years ago. A remarkable discovery had been made of a complete French hand-painted pack of cards of about 1470. This was sold at auction in London to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. An article in the Illustrated London News described the auction; after discussing wardrobes, or some item of the kind, the author, turning ...”

“... Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots), he has recently been resurrected (in English, that is, since in French and German he hadn’t died) as the author of brilliant and bitter, if slightly too well-made fictions. It is from Joan Acocella’s fine introduction to one of them (Beware of Pity) that I take the fact that Zweig wrote a book called The World of ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”

“... protection to Princess Caroline of Monaco, swarmed about by paparazzi wherever she went; while the French courts were found to have given excessive protection, under Article 9 of the civil code, to news of Mitterrand’s cancer, a subject of legitimate public concern. None of this suggests either unworldliness or excessive interventionism on the part of the ...”