“... 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 origins of ethnic and cultural nationalism in German reactions to the universalism of the French Revolution and, specifically, to the alliance of scholars and politicians in post-Napoleonic Germany. The Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (Society for Older German Historical Knowledge), founded in 1819 in Prussia, with contributions ...”

“... It sounds like a modern fairytale: in 1971 two architects, neither of them French, win the most important commission in Paris since the war, the design for the Centre Pompidou, and become famous overnight. The two – a 38-year-old Englishman called Richard Rogers and a 35-year-old Italian called Renzo Piano – design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal braces, with a transparent escalator tube that snakes up the front, and other service tubes, picked out in primary colours, that run up the other sides ...”

“... had manifested.Behind me sat Jeannie, a Eucharistic mystic, and her Cajun ex-seminarian husband, David. (At the reception afterwards, in his lovely honk: ‘Best decision I ever made, to leave!’) The women’s heads were covered. Time had not passed. My younger sister, Mary, walked down the aisle in a sort of black sausage casing, as the wedding ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... resisted vast numbers of soldiers, gendarmes and would-be looters until they were evacuated by French warships. Musa Dagh is also the site of Turkey’s single remaining Armenian village, Vak’if, resettled in 1918 when the area was under French rule. Werfel’s characters are his own, but the book starts with very ...”

“... the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The children were taught the sins of ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the ...”

“... from a review by the late Richard (‘l’étonnant’) Cobb of English historians of the French Revolution: ‘There must be some consolation for present holders of Regius Chairs and hope for future ones to discover just how bad, how indolent, how wrong-headed and how feeble some of their predecessors have been.’26 November 1997. To hear Gordon ...”

“... words were generated by the celebrated youngish American novelist, journalist and story-writer David Foster Wallace. Although willing to tilt at shiny targets of grammatical contention (the ending of sentences with prepositions etc), Wallace was, for the most part, hunting bigger game: America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters ...”