“... father had begun life as a peasant farmer before becoming a builder. Even though François Renard rose to be mayor of Chitry, Renard felt acutely the distance between his life and the lives of his parents. He shared many of his father’s tics – tooth-picking, evasive answers, a fear of enemas – but was alert to their differences, and dreaded the ...”

“... colonies: the officially recorded number of beatings in Cameroon, certainly an underestimate, rose from 315 in 1900 to 4800 in 1913. African chiefs in Cameroon took their case to the Reichstag, but the governor’s subsequent dismissal had more to do with the objections of traders and missionaries to his policy of granting big land concessions to the ...”

“... catastrophic. In the first six years of the Third Reich the annual number of deaths on the roads rose to nearly eight thousand, with as many as forty thousand seriously injured each year. These were the worst accident rates in Europe, worse even than those in Britain, where speed limits had been abolished in 1930 in the belief that Britons would drive like ...”

“... history of Zionism, including the period just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the rightist nationalists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang waged a fierce campaign against British forces and the Arab ...”

“... produce a ‘more or less continuous autobiographical narrative’ which, we are told, the editor Richard Pennington further abbreviated for publication. The first four years of this diary are dissolved into Mr Pennington’s Introduction, and Peterley Harvest, ‘the private diary of David Peterley now for the first time printed’, opened in June 1930 as ...”

“... their home airfield when the undercarriage gave way on landing. When the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard talks dismissively about ‘Brabazon bands’ he is alluding to an ill-fated post-war British airliner. A rock band can be beautiful to look at, sound as sleek and smooth as you like, the gnarled Richard is saying, but ...”

“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace. But Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, though rarely straying from the king’s side in his last disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to ...”

“... suit silhouette by adding oversized pleats and reattaching shredded fabric in a death rose embroidery.’ The designer said the collection is made in ‘a plethora of blue hues and mashed-up pinstripes that make the models look like walking battleships’. I looked at the Chinese man. ‘Awesome, huh?’ he said. There were something like seventy ...”

“... surveys the long march of self-renewals with the benevolent discrimination of a spectator at the Rose Bowl parade. Each float – Puritanism, American Naissance, Modernism, Post-Modernism – seems, as it purrs by, at once more ornate than its predecessor and more elementally vigorous in its overturning of tradition. Always there is the promise of something ...”

“... In fact I was very naive. In Steinberg’s eyes, Israel is the modern-day Dreyfus, and judge Richard Goldstone and his co-authors are the military court, perpetrators of injustice falsely indicting the ‘entire Jewish nation’ of war crimes.3 This takes some doing, not least because Goldstone, as well as being a Jew, has been so deeply involved in ...”

“... unlike the England of today, could conceive of … a merry supernaturalism’.‘Shakespeare never rose higher’ than in this play, which with its ‘silliness and violence’ leads us to think the ‘rowdies’ have ‘climbed over the footlights’. This mob rule is offered as the common sense of the man in the pub: ‘If ever the son of a man in his ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South ...”

“... Pazzi and Rucellai families of their position as clients of the Medici. Some contributors, like Richard Goldthwaite (on consumer demand) and Bill Kent (on ties of neighbourhood), write well about topics on which they have already written elsewhere. Others break new ground, notably Ronald Weissman on ‘Mediterranean Values and Renaissance Society’ and ...”

“... I took a pair of silver-plated scissors in my raincoat pocket with the intent to cut another rose – yellow, if possible – from the rose garden (by the stone lion’s head fountain) just come into bloom – a rose to begin to unbud as the red, almost black-red ...”