“... self. In Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth Century Art and Fiction, David Trotter, the author of several other books about 19th-century writers, proposes what he calls ‘mess-theory’ (and, as a corollary, ‘litter-theory,’ which he regards as the point at which ‘waste’ and ‘mess’ overlap). Trotter’s main argument ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the West. Tunisia enjoyed a warm and privileged relationship with Paris: it was reassuring for the French, angst-ridden about the growing visibility of their Muslim minority, to be able to look approvingly on a Muslim country that peddled its own commitment to laïcité as a signal that although it might be a dictatorship, it was an enlightened and progressive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... loudspeakers on the underside of the aircraft, through which might emerge’, according to David Pascoe, ‘passages from Memories of Lenin, interspersed with exhortations about the Five-Year Plan’. Eighty red lights on the fuselage allowed it to flash slogans to the remotest regions as it swooped across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner ...”

“... of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional history, provides the theme for David Runciman’s modestly titled but far-reaching book. Runciman’s study deals not with pluralism in its current, largely sociological, sense of ethnic, cultural, sexual and lifestyle diversity, but with pluralism in its early 20th-century political sense ...”

“... and file while denouncing the supposed generals. ‘Lions led by donkeys’ – the remark of a French general about British cannon-fodder in Flanders – became the OK vernacular in which to discuss events. (The Donkeys, interestingly enough, was the title of a history of the Somme that formed the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely ...”

“... its population by a million or two. The clear lineal descent of this policy from Japanese and French imperialism, the relentless campaign of lying and falsification by which it was justified, and the coercion and bullying of those brave Americans who resisted it, made the Vietnam War a rather urgent cause for those of us who were essentially politicised ...”

“... decided to settle somewhere or other in France. ‘Somewhere or other’ – the place where the French train stopped when mummy announced that she was tired of travelling – turned out to be a small fishing port on ‘the unfashionable’ (i.e. ultra-fashionable) ‘part of the Côte d’Azur’, between Toulon and Marseilles. It was called Sanary and they ...”

“... government and people had joined in identifying the Dutch as England’s principal enemy. Now French absolutism and Popery, which a number of Charles’s advisers seemed eager to import into England, appeared to be the larger threat. Another change in public perception weakened the Government’s hand as the war destroyed the identification of Puritanism ...”

“... decision also points unerringly towards the kind of strong currency policies which have ravaged French and German employment, along with an underlying determination to join a deflationary single European currency at the earliest plausible opportunity. The second key pointer to the kind of government Tony Blair will lead was the appointment of Frank Field as ...”

“... 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 ‘schoolboyish’ – David Alexander’s word – because what Crowninshield would later call the ‘grossness and ...”

“... love their allies? In the First World War the British authorities quarrelled vigorously with the French, and the attempts of publicists to sentimentalise the Entente Cordiale were a flop. In the Second World War the collapse of France in June 1940 was greeted with sighs of relief. Almost at a stroke, British hopes of salvation were transferred from the ...”

“... England. But Trevor Burridge is a Welshman by birth and a citizen of Canada. He teaches at the French-speaking University of Montreal. One might expect, therefore, that he would bring to English history an outsider’s sense of disbelief, or the cheeky irreverence of an iconoclast. But not so: he is hooked on Clement Attlee. Burridge first became ...”

“... prose of a more elegant age; at times it has the air of a classic novel translated from the French. L’amour, in White’s hands, is the subject both of fervid description (as in some vintage piece of erotica) and of worldly and cynical epigrammatic reflection. ‘Love does not obey the laws of amiability,’ we are told, and ‘love is the least ...”