“... in the 19th and 20th centuries. Woad manufacture was only revived when supply was cut off in France during the Napoleonic wars; and, similarly, the unavailability of German synthetic indigo during the First World War brought passing prosperity to Indian growers. Indigo was an ideal plantation crop. The Dutch in the East Indies, the English in India and ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... painters, came to tire of the job – or at least to look for more demanding work. A trip to France shortly before he died was made in the unsuccessful pursuit of a commission to decorate the Long Gallery of the Louvre. In the exhibition there is an oil sketch for a mighty series of tapestry designs showing the Garter procession that would have hung on ...”

“... dresses, rugs, embroideries, hangings and so on) and of sources (the Pacific, Africa, China, France, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Russia) is very wide. They were a library, tools of the trade, and necessary to sustain an appetite of heroic proportions for colour, texture and pattern.People who visited the rooms shown in the photographs spoke of the blissful ...”

“... made only three trips to Europe – in 1906, 1909 and 1910. He said that when he returned from France, America ‘seemed a chaos of ugliness’, and later that ‘it seemed awfully raw here when I got back. It took me ten years to get over Europe.’ Whittredge found ‘the forest a mass of decaying logs and tangled brush wood, no peasants to pick up every ...”

“... lived for five years in St John’s Wood. She died of consumption in 1882 and Tissot went home to France to paint a series of biblical paintings which were much admired in the Salon. Waterhouse’s adolescent girls are healthier than Burne-Jones’s, but they would have to be, judging by how often their pale bodies are seen by or in dank forest pools; sunless ...”

“... of Britain and the great national surveys such as the one done by Cassini and his colleagues in France had scientific as much as practical ends in view. The result was a degree of accuracy which confirmed (for example) that the world was a spheroid not a sphere, but which was irrelevant to the common traveller. It was gunners who needed to know to a yard ...”

“... One may be able to take a white horse anywhere: how far Napoleon can still be taken – even in France – is less clear. Up to the First World War, the strength or weakness of Bonapartism was usually a potent indicator of how French men and women responded to their nation. Thus Napoleon’s improved reputation in the 1830s (his body was brought back in ...”

“... There is no hiding place in France for anyone who wants time off from Gérard Depardieu, or Georges, the insidious, attractive fortysomething we remember in Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990). The idea that Depardieu has gone or is going anywhere is endlessly tantalising: he has never been more insistent, more palpably at home or preposterous than he is now, as he promises the French he’ll be waddling off in blue-and-white striped pantaloons as a traduced Obelix (1999, passim) lugging a menhir of tax-free earnings ...”

“... desirably, are her books. Now that imperial history is no longer a monotonal tale of Britain or France or Spain or the Dutch against the rest, but rather a complex saga of the collisions, compromises and comings together of many different cultures, how is it to be chronicled so as to fit between the covers of monographs and become accessible to interested ...”

“... in National Context, which consists of essays on 13 European countries – including England, France and Germany, but also many less familiar ones such as Wales, Hungary and Greece. It continues a series which started with Enlightenment in National Context (1981), also edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich. The idea for this series seems a very good ...”

“... economy and that can encompass and evoke a range of themes and moods. The poetic register of Linda France in Red is no less disciplined but more copious and conversational. It enables her both to explore the everyday and to enter more esoteric zones, as at the start of ‘Dutch Interior’: Let’s say this light-filled space is the Netherlands And I am one ...”

“... of taste seem an absurd condescension. Even Pop Art was still fine art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of ...”

“... an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later commissioned by Peter Mandelson ahead of the 2010 general election to write the higher education review that opened the floodgates to the marketisation of British universities.)The Soviet Union owned the pipelines through which all Caspian oil was exported, but with Moscow’s ...”

“... but he does not bang on about it. He is telling a story; his mode, to borrow a phrase from Peter Burke, is thick narrative. First he sets up his characters: Abelard himself; his enemy Bernard of Clairvaux, saint and, on Clanchy’s showing, insufferable rhetorician; his lover, short-lived wife and long-lived correspondent Heloise, niece or daughter and ...”