“... being flown over to France to DJ in clubs in Paris and Lyon, but, despite my best endeavours, the French seemed largely unreceptive. Two or three years later, they finally caught on. The young man who had lost ten thousand francs organising the first (lacklustre) rave in Lyon launched a series of techno compilation CDs. The first sold over 150,000 ...”

“... a major industry if it could help it. The state bookmaker (the Tote, which operated on the French system of pooling bets) was forced to compete for custom with privately owned rivals, which could offer more tempting fixed odds. But the British government wasn’t about to let those private firms flaunt what they were up to. This was to be a commercial ...”

“... rehearsed entertainment; to find parts in the theatre, in London as well as New York; to act in French and Italian movies; and to appear on talk shows, where he was a great and good holder-forth. Any two minutes of him were apt to bring out something fresh. People think they know what makes a star, but there isn’t any one thing. I used to have an idea ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... shows, too, how technically difficult printing forced printer-publishers to look overseas. The French were better at printing in red and black, and so two-colour liturgical books were often imported from abroad. The greatness of the Great Bible (1538) was in part a product of its physical heft: printed on large demy paper, an unbound copy was ‘more than ...”

“... undergoing the fate of Canaan long ago and Palestine today. In a different spirit the 19th-century French socialist writer Pierre Leroux learned Hebrew in order to translate, or rather adapt in a dramatic form, the Book of Job, as a lesson on ‘the resurrection and perfectibility of Mankind’. About the same time there was a mass arrest of Jews in Damascus ...”

“... Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it was to be alive. Margaret Mount Cashell was filled to the brim with republican sympathies, inspired by her former ...”

“... her veil, Loti had not twigged that one of his principal sources for the details of harem life was French, a turcophile like him, and herself a writer – she had produced her own account of life in the women’s quarters, Le Jardin fermé, in 1908. She and her two Turkish friends began their games with Loti idly, but, she maintained, became serious when they ...”

“... therefore rather like summarising a department store during the winter sales. It contains British, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian and American writers. It parades other ranks, NCOs and officers of various grades in the army of history (some of the latter claiming honorary guerrilla status). There are papers, ranging from the fairly concise to the ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... ecological credentials, which anticipate those of another wilderness-loving loner, Henry David Thoreau, Natty is also, as the book’s final words put it, ‘the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within hours of ...”

“... he knows off the top of his head that Archibald is a ‘Lowland Scottish’ name, ‘via Old French and Old High German’, and that ‘boulevard’ derives ‘from the old French boullewerc’. He can identify ‘a voiced palatal glide morphing into a voiceless alveolar fricative’, and speaks good ...”

“... providing ‘drugs for government ministries … call girls for officials … information about ex-French Africa’, not to mention ‘spying on the Scientologists’, ‘radical Islamists’ and ‘Israel’, which makes you wonder why she’d let €5000 detain her, though there turns out to be a sort of reason later on. She hates airports, loves vintage ...”

“... that, however, is by Robert Schumann. His five songs for Mary Stuart, especially as performed in French by Victoria de los Angeles, have all that plaintive, innocent tone, full of suppressed sexuality, which made me so happy when I was 14.The best books to induce this mood were by Jean Plaidy. The first was called The Royal Road to Fotheringhay, published in ...”