“... months before she died, she carefully arranged the table for supper in her SoHo loft with candles, French wine, which she snobbishly preferred when living in America, and delicious food that she had bullied me into buying earlier at her local delicatessen, Dean & Deluca. She introduced her favourite subject – love – and we discussed it ...”

“... didn’t have the flaw and that the inverted centre was imagined. Theodore Champion, the leading French dealer who acquired the stamp at auction in 1931, seems to have kept it for a while among his own rarities. In 1980 it was revealed that the mysterious Vicomte de Rosny bought the stamp from Champion sometime before the Second World War. The Vicomte was an ...”

“... for himself, Hill Barn, on the downs near Mere. Orbach’s description of Hill Barn as ‘slightly French’ is unexceptionable. There is indeed an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another self-designed, but suburban, house of a very different painter, Roger Fry. The inclusion of this remote, largely unrecorded ...”

“... is pretty much what happened on the morning of 2 July 1816, when Captain de Chaumareys piloted the French frigate Medusa into shallow water near the coast of Senegal – though in his case it was sheer incompetence rather than a deliberate decision. As crew members noted, the waters into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously warm. The captain did not ...”

“... to tell the truth, she was not très crazy about.’ What’s a girl who likes to show off her French to do among boys who give their testicles names and aspire to work for the power company? Alison thinks she’s too good for Kyle, the boy next door (‘he looked like a skeleton with a mullet’), but she’s not completely up herself: Was she ...”

“... to her career tell us much more about ourselves than they do about her. We did not hear from David Cameron that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party. Before the great banking bust of 2008, which owed much to her policies, he had ditched her and her legacy. No one pointed out either that, despite her well-known convictions and ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... their origins in absolutism; they resurfaced in different forms in the social republicanism of the French Revolution and, especially, in the authoritarianism of Bismarck’s Germany. At present, the trend is away from the baroque tradition, though the new Anglo-Saxon model is not simply a revival of the puritan tradition: in modern systems of pension provision ...”

“... He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting a picture herself. Often they would create scenes ...”

“... which we did not. To be cut off from all that would relegate the British to the level of the French or Italians, would finally bury our great power status, would ruin MI6. Successive British premiers, on visits to Washington, repeatedly attempted to assure one US President after another that we had put our house in order, that now we could really be ...”

“... after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three ...”

“... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...”

“... poems have been shown to be translations from Ronsard and Marot, and one suspects that others have French originals. But despite this niggling, one can still make out – or invent – a certain picture of Montgomerie from these short poems. He seems to have been a poet influenced partly by the tradition of Scots court poetry going back to Dunbar, partly by ...”

“... three liveried servants, a Malay he had brought back from the Endeavour voyage, a gardener, a French chef and two French horn players. A new set of Wedgwood Queen’s Ware china was packed for onshore entertainment.During the three years of the Endeavour’s voyage, planting the flag and tagging the plants ...”

“... speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his ...”