“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were used it was said that they should be limited to finger-spelling and to signed English (or French, or German) – a way of conveying English sentences more or less word for word. The aim was a pupil who read and lip-read English, and who had learned how to utter English words. This is called ‘oralism’. Their opponents, until recently a more or less ...”

“... using phrases like ‘collective Arab narrative’ in their conversations with Said at the UN, and David Gilmour, one of the authors under review, is equally improbably described as being frustrated by the ‘non-narrative character of Lebanon’s problems’. Reports of events since the fall of Beirut are described as ‘pre-narrative or, in a ...”

“... in leftist intellectual and artistic circles, but made far less welcome by officialdom: the French interior ministry sent gendarmes to the Sorbonne to prevent a screening of Battleship Potemkin – they feared the film might set a bad example for their own working class – and eventually had the Russians expelled from the country. Rather than return ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”