“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ...”

“... shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries later, after a Sunday tabloid reported ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... connection to the family story. Transorbital lobotomy was an American phenomenon, never legal in France. Perhaps the subject is irresistible from an archivist’s point of view because so floridly documented: this was an essentially public atrocity, somehow both craze and crusade. The caption of one of Freeman’s post-operative photographs makes Yon’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of East and West alike. This other Ransome was, I think, first brought to public attention by David Caute in The Fellow Travellers (1973), then by Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never ...”

“... hovering over the empirical world – a sort of Platonic heaven. Alain Connes of the Collège de France once declared that ‘there exists, independently of the human mind, a raw and immutable mathematical reality,’ one that is ‘far more permanent than the physical reality that surrounds us’. Roger Penrose, another unabashed Platonist, holds that the ...”

“... 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 ...”