“... 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 ...”

“... in a new print at the BFI, was based on a German film called Fanfares of Love, first made in French in 1935 and then remade in 1951. Wilder, in 1959, was thinking mainly of the original, which he said was ‘deliriously bad’. Coming from him this was a compliment rather than a complaint, and he certainly found in the old work the basic premise of the ...”

“... the story of an early lead, in this case literally lead, becoming a handicap. Already during the French Revolution Carnot had commissioned an inventor, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, to produce a native pencil, and Conté had responded in 1794 with what soon became the international pencil: the lead in it was made up of a mixture of water, graphite and clay, and ...”

“... of this project had found their way into the enlightened declarations of the American and French revolutionaries. Baron Cosimo’s treatise would have found an enthusiastic reader in Shelley, but then he was always a marginal man. The one philosophe who might have understood it was Rousseau, who stands Janus-faced at the edge of the Enlightenment ...”

“... be abandoned’). The compilers have cast their nets wide, devoting over a hundred entries to French, German and Italian historians, and thirty more to Classical writers like Herodotus, Livy and Tacitus. But the bulk of biographical essays are about Anglo-American scholars. As a result, this book supplies something of a prosopography of the Transatlantic ...”

“... said and not enough on the way of saying. A second might be that a European (and particularly French) sense of the mystique of language itself entered poetry in English through Modernism, and just as Modernism has thrived in America and been rejected in England, so does the language of the modern American poem tend to come to life of itself rather than ...”

“... and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s ...”

“... greeted the last major Wilson exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, curated by David Solkin, now of the Courtauld Institute, certainly the best, and probably the most respected, historian of 18th-century British art now practising. In the introduction to his excellent and, as it turned out, controversial catalogue, Solkin had suggested that ...”

“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”

“... a relaxed, multi-layered approach to questions of suzerainty and allegiance prevailed. A single, French-dominated ‘religious and knightly culture’ had spread across what were now southern Scotland and northern England. Stewart cites the striking example of Holme Cultram Abbey, a monastery of the French Cistercian ...”

“... nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a celebration of French peasant smallholding or the view from the Glacier Hotel. Effectiveness, in a work of art, is never to be measured in terms of honesty or accuracy or up-to-dateness – only by the power of the preserved fiction to put up-to-dateness back into the bruising ...”

“... The erosion of the academic system by market pressures, and its temporary abolition during the French Revolution, accentuated the studio’s function as an entrepreneurial space. In the wonderfully vivid ensembles that Boilly staged in the studios of the painter Isabey (in 1798) and the sculptor Houdon (in 1804) we can see the affirmation of these ...”

“... other times I thought it was moving his way. Zhou En-lai’s famous remark about the impact of the French Revolution, that it was too early to tell, might be said of the impact of the Oslo Accord. Said called his most recent book The End of the Peace Process: that strikes me as premature. What was started at Oslo is still alive, if only just. The peace process ...”

“... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...”

“... a first and a last in Western Europe. In its wake there were tangible gains for the majority of French citizens. Two militants at a Peugeot assembly plant in Franche-Comté were killed by security forces in the aftermath, when the workforce decided to stay on strike – one was shot, the other forced to jump off a bridge, or some say a wall – but no one ...”