“... He travelled – ironically for the dedicated Francophobe of the Syrian dispute – throughout France, first as brass-rubber, then as a student of fortifications, displaying a certain scholarly ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior ...”

“... the contorted oaks and blasted trunks of the great Romantic – and Christian – painter, Caspar David Friedrich, and the drawings of his lesser contemporaries such as the illustrator of fairy-tales, Moritz von Schwind. There are enigmatic cherubim lurking in the vegetation, and Poe-like ravens and other birds of ill omen in the branches; the sulphurous ...”

“... his closest to recent studies in the politics of literature by British literary historians such as David Norbrook and Jonathan Dollimore. These essays, which originated as lectures, are certainly dazzling performances. To historians like myself, what is most impressive about them is not the attention to historical context, which we have been trained to ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... with its stable marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... and left-wing views. They can unite on racial issues, while differing sharply on others. In France, socialists and Communists have recently demonstrated that they can be as racist as anyone on the far right. And people in Britain who belong to racial minorities do not share a single set of left-wing views: they may all be opposed to racism, but they ...”

“... which Macdonald sets his scene, Brendel had published his History of Music in Italy, Germany and France, a work which already in this first of several editions promotes the idea of a strong progressive line in German music. Brendel identified a new tendency arising out of Beethoven, initially in the piano music of Schumann, and particularly ...”

“... than emphasise the physique, didn’t help. The fashion Henrietta Maria brought with her from France was for an amorphous shape with a loose-laced bodice – a departure from the tightly corseted, inverted triangular numbers favoured by the Tudors and Elizabethans. When Holbein drew Cecily Heron, Thomas More’s third and youngest daughter, during her ...”

“... living in Mallorca in the second. In the first she has escaped the round-ups of Jews in Occupied France, and kills herself in Milan much later. In the second she is not Jewish, and what she has survived is a raffish 1960s youth which involved, among other things, a little larceny and a little prostitution, and hanging out with Peter Rachman in London. The ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... owners, nor the population at large, saw them as part of the national heritage. By comparison with France, Germany or Italy, Britain was slow to develop legislation to protect historic buildings and works of art. Most aristocrats were hostile to such intervention, repudiating the implication that they were imperfect custodians of their inheritance or that ...”

“... too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet appeared, and that ‘all general maxims in politics ought to be established with ...”

“... to issues of justice. He sought to apply to Paris the dictum from his Mémoires: ‘How rich France would become if it were well governed – above all well administered.’ Administration was for Haussmann fundamentally about forging the conditions of wealth and prosperity for the bourgeois order that had emerged victorious from the traumas of ...”