“... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year after the outbreak of the French Revolution; they include Britain’s wars with France which lasted, almost without a break, from 1793 to 1815; they end just 12 years before the Great Reform Act. At no other time has Parliament experienced such a concentrated amalgam of trial, triumph and ...”

“... some of the blame for mankind’s ‘deliberate regression’. On he goes to the neo-classic (French, German and Danish versions). The thesis comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next ...”

“... is narrated by a Paul Auster figure, a dedicated novelist called Peter Aaron whose c.v. includes a French apprenticeship, a novel called Luna, even (like his creator) a spell teaching at Princeton. He writes about Sachs, who has confided to him the secret of his final, fatal phase, from an admiring, quizzical standpoint not unlike that of Conrad’s Marlow ...”

“... What if it’s not a philosophical question at all? It’s striking that Oë comes closest to his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did ...”

“... turns out to be brief – brief and uneventful. All that happens is that we pass field guns and a French-built tank in the street. We pass jagged buildings and mounds of tandoori-coloured earth, staked with sticks to mark graves. Aid is being transported to Mogadishu by groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food ...”

“... the theatre of a state opening of Parliament, featuring such kenspeckle figures as ‘Sir David Frost arriving to exchange a word with his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal’, and the Earl Marshal pointing out the patriotic wall paintings to his French guests and saying: ‘Vous ...”

“... premises in Stratford during or soon after the town’s first great Shakespearean festival, David Garrick’s Jubilee of 1769; it may even have adorned the Birthplace itself, part of which was still in business as the Swan and Maidenhead Inn. Garrick himself preferred to think of the infant Shakespeare being taught by Nature rather than Fancy: but the ...”

“... two Princeton philosophers. Mallach, the physicist in Properties of Light, shares many ideas with David Bohm. Klapper, who thinks ‘Goethe … settled for being a genius’ and could have gone further, has, like Bloom (Harold, not Allan), an eidetic memory. And if Goldstein is caught up in the erotics of mental power, so the female protagonist in The ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... has a seedy charm. Built after the turn of the century, it is old-fashioned, grand with decaying French tapestries, endless public rooms, English & French prints, marble statuary, and very dirty carpets.’ The hotel’s notepaper, which Hugh had used to write to me (I have that letter), had photographs of the Crillon’s ...”

“... rulers.A collective Shia identity was strengthened after the end of the First World War, when French colonial administrators introduced separate religious courts. When Lebanon gained independence in 1943, its sectarian political system was enshrined in the National Pact, signed by Shia, Sunni and Maronite leaders. Officially, Lebanon became a ...”

“... But amid pages of pure bafflement he can be simply coruscating, and he repeatedly evinces the French dandy’s aptitude for rhetorical flourish or caustic phraseology. His fund of metaphors and analogies for illustrating musical thoughts is large: it is no trouble at all for him to bring in Turner’s painting of Windsor when talking about the dreamlike ...”

“... racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s ...”