“... and Edith Wharton, the Boits travelled back and forth across the Atlantic and took up residence in France and Italy at various periods, as well as in Boston and Newport. Sometime in the late 1870s, Ned Boit, as he was always known, met Sargent in Paris, either through other expatriate Americans or because their art teachers were friends. The Boits had four ...”

“... translation of the first 40 pages. Now I understand why, nine years after its first publication in France, the book hasn’t been translated. Le Clézio’s decision to use period and Créole words gives it a very particular sense of time and place. The period words are easy to translate because there are English equivalents such as timoneer, lazaret and ...”

“... Stalin pressured Churchill and Roosevelt into committing themselves to opening a second front in France, to which all available landing craft had to be diverted. Still, Roosevelt had anointed China as one of the ‘Four Policemen’ of the postwar world. This meant overlooking Chiang’s ‘Confucian fascism’, and no notice was taken in Washington when, on ...”

“... recordings could have data stripped from them and still sound as good. The information theorist David Huffman had also demonstrated that sonic regularities – a violin string vibrating at a steady pitch, say – could be encoded in such a way that they took up minimal data, then subsequently decoded and expanded into audio information at playback. On the ...”

“... of the First World War. Nowadays, as MacGregor notes, it has become a symbol of friendship between France and Germany, each of which has claimed to be Charlemagne’s true heir. As we move through the centuries, there are Dürer etchings and Bauhaus prints; there’s a 17th-century plague mask and billion-mark banknotes from the hyperinflation of 1923. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Are counter-factuals, then, a seductive but hopeless strategy for the historical imagination? David Lewis argued in Counterfactuals (1973) that warranted counter-factuals not only had to obey causal logic, they had to imply a real alternative world, of which it seemed there must be an infinite number. Hawthorn along with earlier critics rejects this ...”

“... to SIS, or both. But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides fascinating if overblown speculations about the supposed ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... of official action existed in Britain, Dicey’s hostility to civil law systems in general and to France in particular led him to insist that in England ‘we have no droit administratif.’ Loughlin notes the curious (and under-studied) decline of judicial interventionism in the first part of the 20th century, as the negative freedoms which preoccupied ...”

“... or that its history mirrors that of Jewish migrations, is a trope of modern antisemitism. As David Nirenberg put it in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), the association of Judaism with worldliness and money is ‘as ancient as Christianity itself’. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance ...”

“... the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and facing growing internal opposition to his liberalisation strategy. Brown, long regarded at Westminster and by the media as a ruthless operator, was widely ...”

“... 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 ...”