“... 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 ...”

“... to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... validate my experience of reading, and relishing, the novel London Bridge. How had the trepanned French maniac achieved such a rapturous sense of the city’s psychogeography – Willesden to Soho to Rotherhithe? I was introduced at the desk, in the way that one is, to an American writer who told me that he’d heard about my novels, even picked up ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there were five rooms. A large bow-windowed bedroom at the front with a huge feather-bed belonged to my maternal grandparents. Next to it was the ...”

“... channel AMC, credits Evans with mentoring her in her earlier career as a screenwriter. In 2020 David Zaslav, head of the Warner-Discovery conglomerate that includes HBO, bought and renovated Evans’s home in Beverly Hills. Biskind writes that the househad seen its share of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll, had succumbed to weeds, rot and decay, and become a ...”

“... her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole. She was the improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature. She could have ...”