“... a free trade area looked as if they might be more attractive to Bonn, threatening the primacy of Franco-German commercial ties. But it was not the technical opinion of hauts fonctionnaires that decided the issue. Nor was it the personal preference of Mollet himself, who had always favoured European integration but been quite unable to carry his party, the ...”

“... to inevitability.’ This doesn’t, I think, preclude the view offered fifty years ago by Paul Schroeder, a leading American diplomatic historian, that the statesmen and politicians involved felt themselves to be in the grip of forces beyond their control and that this perception influenced their actions. Nor does it mean that some – indeed most ...”

“... surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller ...”

“... with its nostalgia for the old ways, and its little jokes about religion (‘my theory why St Paul speaks as he does of women: that he knew only church workers’). A diary entry speaks of ‘that English mixture of the genteel and the raffish’, another of ‘lovely Suffolk, how it combines amplitude with modesty, a model to the English mind’. A sort ...”

“... knew Sanskrit and could rapidly mug up almost any other language he wanted (chatting away to Paul Kruger in Afrikaans, for example). As a child brought up by a single parent without any of the advantages of aristocratic descent or a wider family network, he embraced wholeheartedly and romantically all the institutions of the establishment, and they in ...”

“... salute to a crowd of thirty thousand inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing Paul Robeson and Dean Acheson. An awestruck young Alistair Cooke reported in the Guardian that ‘he looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint ...”

“... language (Spanish) and translated into another, English, three years after its first appearance. Franco Moretti has speculated that this novel and others like it speak to the world system from the periphery in ways that would be impossible if they were set in Europe or North America: they hold out the possibility of re-enchantment in our disenchanted ...”

“... a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone de Beauvoir is important only because of her association with Sartre. Her four volumes of autobiography are sometimes seen merely as useful source material ...”

“... declare that he wanted to be sure that he really was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish plebiscites; that everyone had stopped mocking him as a cuckold after his first wife had left him; that he was not, like so many of his ...”

“... much second best – see someone discover. One of the people I interviewed was Louis de Branges, a Franco-American mathematician at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, with one significant proof already under his belt. De Branges was convinced that a mathematical field in which he was the acknowledged specialist would lead to a proof of the hypothesis. I ...”

“... linguistic implications and secrets that it couldn’t see what wasn’t hiding in plain sight. Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2005) recommended an alertness to data and difference, and a certain aloofness from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden ...”

“... collaborationists. When he won the Roger-Nimier Prize in May 1968, it was bestowed on him by Paul Morand, a former adviser to Pierre Laval. Modiano defended his borrowings from anti-Semitic literature as a ‘kind of weapon’ against anti-Semitism, but this critique, it turned out, could also be read as a homage. Modiano’s​ best-known Occupation ...”

“... a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could be, how happy, how free. I can ...”

“... have pressed for a separate peace during the September 1939-June 1940 period, when the Anglo-Franco-German war was conspicuously not raging after Poland’s rapid defeat. Newly-elevated into the government after so long an exclusion, with a well-deserved reputation for bellicosity being his only claim to office, Churchill could hardly exceed Neville ...”

“... his Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton ...”