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“... ReaderAt a noisy party many years ago, I was talking to my fellow novelist (and LRB contributor) Ferdinand Mount, who told me that he reread Madame Bovary every year, as both a literary duty and a pleasure. I was mightily impressed – he’d therefore doubtless read it many more times than I had – and carried this detail around for years. I was ...”

“... far the most effective critiques of recent British developments; all had a past at the Spectator: Ferdinand Mount, former aide to Thatcher, whose The New Few had appeared in 2012; Peter Oborne, whose Triumph of the Political Class was published five years earlier; and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose Yo, Blair! came out in 2007. The first looked at the ...”

“... was only the fourth son of a Scottish nobleman, and his posting at the Court of the repulsive King Ferdinand of Naples and his clever, fecund Queen, Maria Carolina, placed him very much in the outer circle of British diplomacy. Emma was a blacksmith’s daughter who never lost her Lancashire accent. She went to London, as so many did, and saved herself from ...”

“... and anxieties bred by the long war. Rabin had routed them, but then allowed them to regroup and mount a counter-attack. For this he paid with his life. His murder changed the history of Israel, much as the murder of Franz Ferdinand changed the history of Europe. Rabin wanted to move forward towards ...”

“... In 1954 Louis-Ferdinand Céline was still a pariah in France: a collaborator during the Occupation (it had ended only a decade earlier), a notorious anti-semite (his bloodthirsty ‘pamphlets’ dated from as recently as 1941), and in the view of many Frenchmen, the undeserving beneficiary of a 1951 amnesty that allowed him to return to France from Denmark, where he had taken refuge – and served over a year in prison – after the war ...”

“... his followers. Breault began his campaign to alert the authorities immediately after he left the Mount Carmel ranch in 1989. In Texas he got almost nowhere: the Sheriff’s Department in Waco dismissed his warnings as ‘sour grapes’, the local media were indifferent, and it was only after he’d contacted the father of one of the children in the compound ...”

“... Though not much enjoying service in the field, the army was in Powell’s genes, as his nephew Ferdinand Mount has written. For him, patriotism was inseparable from the military record of the country, whose defining experience as he grew up was the First World War, in which his father was a decorated officer, at a time when Britain still headed the ...”

“... aggrandisement (his discovery brought him international celebrity) or else in cahoots with Ferdinand Marcos. By 1971, Marcos’s second term of office (he had been re-elected in 1969) was going badly. There had been destabilising attacks by Maoist guerrillas of the New People’s Army and increasingly violent protests from leftist students; unrest was ...”

“... fewer long-term effects even for Jews than, for example, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand or of Henry IV of France. Jewish historians must always remind themselves that they are specialised workers in the larger historical field which is concerned with what is sometimes referred to as the ‘host community’. The two books before us, recent ...”

“... sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount. During the day the poet would sit for the painter beneath an open skylight in the high garret of the house. When the light failed the two men turned to talking and walking in the garden. One evening, just after the sun had set, something flashed across the ...”

“... that accompanied the match made much of the king’s achievements. They stressed the ‘rich mount’ of his prosperity, playing on the name of his father’s earldom (Richmond) and his own new palace by the Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its ...”

“... range equally extraordinary.’ Dwelling on the even play of curiosity that followed from it, Ferdinand Mount, who has written notably well about his uncle, remarks that so far from being snobbish, as often charged, ‘his fiction is extraordinarily democratic in a way few other writers of his time could claim.’The judgment is carefully formulated ...”

“... Wagner was a good conversationalist, he retorted: ‘Do you imagine, sir, that the conversation of Mount Etna is pleasant?’ Was this oracular volcano the same man whom German readers knew for his love of pranks, dogs, soft furnishings and other people’s money? In 1877, the Neue Freie Presse got the scoop of publishing Wagner’s letters to his costumier ...”

“... discussions of geology and theories of the sublime, we get occasional glimpses of the Bourbon king Ferdinand IV fleeing to Sicily hotly pursued by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who takes the throne until he in turn is forced to flee. Brewer’s is a thematic rather than a chronological account, but even broad themes need to be understood ...”

“... Latin by comparing them with those of his close contemporary Lorenzo Valla, who in his Life of Ferdinand of Aragon also found himself compelled to use modern terms for such things as the compass, the clock and the cannon. He could have shed another kind of light on Alberti’s experiments with Italian by comparing them with those of his friend and ...”