“... literary interests to years of clerical drudgery; both wrote war despatches; both travelled in France; both participated in revolutionary events (1848,17 June 1953) and then worked for repressive regimes; they had the same number of children and the same kind of wife. Last but not least, they said the same things, literally; but this is less surprising in ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his ...”

“... like this – Wilfred Owen’s was not dissimilar: away to Oxfordshire, away teaching in France long before enlistment – is that they exacerbate sibling tensions, intolerance, even dislike. Given the hopelessly misdated or undated state of Gurney archives at the time he was writing his book, Michael Hurd’s The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978), the ...”

“... is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to ...”

“... Molineux) long since lost in the mists. The issue also contains a consideration of the sociologist David Riesman, since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an ...”

“... The regime of grandees and merchants which oversaw the financial revolution and the war against France in the 1690s was a descendant of the compact of colonists in the 1630s. Brenner’s book concludes with the words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 and its sequels not only realised the project of 1640-1641 of the Parliamentary capitalist aristocracy; in so ...”

“... and he told me a bit about him. His wife was Czech, they had two sons, one an anthropologist in France, the other a student of philosophy in the States. For twenty years he and Louis Althusser had been the philosophy department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he himself had gone to School. After Althusser’s disaster (he’d gone mad, killed his ...”

“... Perhaps in a sweetheart ‘democratic’ union prepared in advance by some Bulldog Drummond like David Hart.I read Milne’s book with a faint blush of shame because, not having paid daily attention to the strike and not having much liked Scargill when I met him. I had not disbelieved everything I read about the union funds. Furthermore, some of the bylines ...”

“... Whig, Sloane witnessed at first hand the military persecution of his co-religionists in southern France in the 1680s when studying medicine there, and by the end of that decade, already a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, he was established as medical adviser to the new Governor of Britain’s slave colony in Jamaica. The ...”

“... frames with restlessly curvaceous surface, outline and section that were made in mid-18th-century France. Yet it could not be plausibly argued that these styles of frame evolved in response to the needs of particular styles of painting. The dark rectilinear frames reveal the same neat machined finish, techniques of veneering and exotic materials found in ...”

“... the past 15 years. From the early Eighties, Western European socialist-led administrations – in France, Spain and Italy, then in Scandinavia – began to bend to the free-market gale blowing throughout the capitalist world. In Australasia, Labour governments, which were elected on traditional corporatist or social-democratic platforms, were quick to adopt ...”

“... idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous one, the brothers of George III, must have run them pretty close. George behaved like a ...”

“... of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive weapon. Sometimes Newton’s pleasure seems merely ...”

“... and tweed, shooting and croquet and tennis, and holidays in huge hotels in Torquay or the South of France. There is a splendidly evocative picture of Galsworthy ‘in his Oxford rooms’ with a chum, ‘studying racing form at breakfast’ while a servant hovers against the dark wallpaper. All this, with Harrow, Lincoln’s Inn and a private income, went to ...”