“... or Britain. Traditionally, British diplomats had much less influence at the Ottoman court than French and Russian ones. In addition, the Foreign Office increasingly disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at ...”

“... parrot, representing clever vocalisation without much brain power, was Pure Word. If you were a French academic, you might say that he was un symbole de Logos. Being English, I hasten back to the corporeal: to that svelte, perky creature I had seen at the Hôtel-Dieu. I imagined Loulou sitting on the other side of Flaubert’s desk and staring back at him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book, The Long March of the French Left. In 1984 he wrote a memorable piece about national intelligence agencies, and the following year, a homage to Pierre Mendès France, one of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a ...”

“... in its way, theoretically sophisticated work it is. Watt cites Lukács in German and Durkheim in French, alongside works by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... it was said, had planted the boy’s father in front of Israeli gun positions and moved the French TV crew that recorded the killing into position nearby – all to prove an ideological point.Misrepresentation has made it almost impossible for the American public to understand the geographical basis of the events, in this, the most geographical of ...”

“... enough roll call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a ...”

“... of Roman water did, a vast and clever system that harnessed rivers and used canals and pipes. For David Sedlak, who divides the past, present and future of water into four ages, this was the beginning of Water 1.0, when the Roman model – sewers to remove dirty water and clean pipes to supply it – was copied in European cities. Drinking-water treatment is ...”

“... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a view ...”

“... the Charing Cross Road’. Occasionally, the day’s work done, he goes to pubs and meets poets: David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very ...”

“... are perceived’, and it’s this faculty which malfunctions in Hartman’s more fanciful flights. David Simpson’s central subject is indicated by Hartman’s passing remark about Wordsworth’s ‘residual agrarian sensibility’. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination is his second book on Wordsworth, following and complementing Wordsworth and the Figurings ...”

“... character in Apocalypse Now mournfully observes; but one sometimes wonders. In Out of the Sixties David Wyatt argues that Vietnam remains ‘the defining thing, our war, our story’, and he compares it to an iceberg, ‘a mostly submerged history that cruises through our dreams’. Oddly though, he in the end makes very few connections between the work of ...”

“... when he encountered them among Hebridean chiefs. But Auchinleck’s Scotland, for all the David Humes and Adam Smiths and Hugh Blairs, still had one foot in times when family feuds were settled by the spear and the firing of houses. To the old taunt, Boswell’s guts responded in the old way. Meanwhile Boswell went on wrestling vainly with his own ...”

“... the country’. It would become a rhythm of confinement. He would jaunt to the French Riv and hang out with all the sexy Ballet Russes dancers. While in the asylum she scribbled out an SOS to Ezra Pound, signing herself ‘Little Nell’ in letters (another character, Dickens’s doomed girl-heroine, always seeing herself as a fiction). Of ...”