“... more than 150 illustrations.‘I do warrant you,’ the lord admiral of the English fleet, Charles Howard of Effingham, reported from his flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The ...”

“... her lips. The Antiquary was published in 1816, not long after the Allies had insisted that the French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre. Major works (by Titian, Raphael and probably Van Eyck, as well as by Spanish artists) which had been illegally removed and found their way into private collections ...”

“... he heard anything. In April 2018, an official at Agence France-Muséums, the entity set up by the French government to handle loans and acquisitions for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, finally replied to Gabolde. He explained that the stele originated from the collection of Johannes Behrens, a German merchant navy officer, who had bought it in Cairo in 1933 from a ...”

“... Professor Duby confines his attention to the main source for William’s life, a poem in Norman French of some twenty thousand lines commissioned by his son and written a few years after William’s death. The personal memoirs of William – for it is as such that he treats the text – are those, otherwise hardly accessible, of the knightly classes of the ...”

“... they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that London feared French ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean, Nicholas hoped for an understanding with the British. Returning to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed ...”

“... occupation of improving’, even as he tried to make a go now of one thing, now of another. Howard Feinstein has written a brilliant study of William’s crises over idleness, illness and vocation, within the context of intense parental and sibling entanglements, especially as these lead back to his father’s own conflicts with his father, the fearsome ...”

“... of this kind’. One expects that sort of thing from Portillo, who probably thinks Lebanon is French and something to do with the European Union and therefore to be opposed. Rifkind should know better. Probably he does. Before we left London I had the impression that, with Rifkind away in Bolivia or somewhere, our attitude was being laid down not by the ...”

“... patrician composure suggestive of Burt Lancaster playing Lampedusa’s Leopard. Neither Vidal nor Howard Auster, his long-standing companion, swam in the pool, which was even more impressively blue than the sea at the foot of the cliff. Sunshine, cypresses, cicadas, scented air, the physical drama: all the sense-heightening Mediterranean stuff. Kurt ...”

“... the abolition of monarchy and established Church, liberty for Dissenters, support for American and French rebels, the expectation of a swift arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And, to make matters worse, Priestley reckoned all these views were firmly based on the most up-to-date sciences, such as the electricity and chemistry he did so much to ...”

“... scale (or reputation) and is now more likely to be seen savouring the small pungent epiphanies of Howard Hodgkin than gazing at a Rauschenberg, however huge. It is almost as if the younger gallery-goer had already digested Charles Harrison’s salutary and illuminating study of the theory and practice of Modernist art in England, with its detailed clinical ...”

“... dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank ...”

“... All the same, if Anglophone readers are after a Chinese spy novel, Xiao Bai’s historically rich French Concession, set in 1930s Shanghai, will be published by Harper Collins next year, and is a better bet than Mai Jia’s potboiler. Perry Link wrote a balanced review – marginally favourable – of Decoded in the New York Times. This was difficult for Mai ...”

“... mordant, furious. The novel opens in 1962, at a party in London, where 19-year-old Audrey Howard, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, a secretary with an angry reserve and a nearly crushing sense of her own ignorance, watches Joel Litvinoff, white-toothed and brilliant, an American lawyer with the physical assurance of an athlete and the ...”

“... sous les auspices de la reine (Paris, 1790) demonstrates a far from reverent attitude towards the French royal family. In one scene Lafayette is described having intercourse with Marie Antoinette while being simultaneously buggered by Bailly. Marie Antoinette declares that her only pleasure is to be foutue en con and wants to engage a whole regiment of ...”

“... in the 1790s; The Police and the People (1970), his first monograph in English, concerned French popular protest in the decades after the Revolution; Reactions to the French Revolution (1972) ranged beyond the metropole to the records of the départements for individual perspectives on the Revolution ‘from ground ...”