“... from fiction by both Henry and Sarah, reinforced by a misunderstanding of the comments of a French critic on an episode in Sarah’s David Simple; and on the freewheeling appeals to unnamed psychologists, already noticed. The first item is the only one involving the barest appearance of a biographical fact. After ...”

“... when a government promises and then fails to hold down numbers, or vaunts expulsion targets (the French target announced for 2012 is 35,000).September 11 dealt a blow to freedom of movement. Like a front-end collision in a car, it triggered a dramatic security response. Immigration policy was still on the road, but the airbags had been released and remained ...”

“... and its press. It’s proof, as Dorothy Wellesley wrote, that as ‘foreigners, especially the French, tell us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful ...”

“... in Soho pubs or edgy artists and hangers-on. Bacon had established himself in places such as the French House and the Colony Room, and he became close to Lucian Freud, thirteen years his junior. Freud bought work from Bacon, including Two Figures (1953), a depiction of two naked men on a bed passionately engaged in sex, which Freud kept opposite his own ...”

“... any of the above. ‘The euro is essentially a foreign currency for every Eurozone country,’ the French economist Michel Aglietta and his co-author, Thomas Brand, write in Un New Deal pour l’Europe. ‘It binds them to rigidly fixed exchange rates, regardless of their underlying economic realities, and strips them of monetary autonomy.’ For Aglietta, a ...”

“... Around the base crouch four chained figures representing the major battles Nelson won against the French: Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. The figures do not look like Africans, but they are black, they are manacled and I was not the only child in Liverpool who took them to be slaves.This mistake was actually an insight, because the ...”

“... early death at the age of 44. As a boy playing on Berkhamsted Common, Greene had cast himself as David Balfour, and as a novelist he can be thought to have given his own bleak twist to the kind of ‘adventure story’ with which Stevenson’s name was for so long associated. In 1949 he began to write a biography of Stevenson, abandoning it only when he ...”

“... In one of the most influential, the 1898 Introduction to the Study of History by the French historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos, the authors warn that history is more encumbered with detail than any other form of academic writing and that those who write it must have those details under control. The best way of proceeding, they ...”

“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... and in MI5, who took over intelligence operations there from MI6 in 1973. Exactly like the French Army before it in Algeria, these key circles within the British Army now decided that in order to prevent a sell-out of the imperial position in the overseas province by leftists (Guy Mollet/Harold Wilson) or weak-minded centrists (Pierre Pflimlin/Edward ...”

“... argued document asking for the review to be undertaken in the first place. The NCC’s chairman, David Pascall, is a former member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just so happens that ...”

“... evidence to refute Goudsmit’s accusation, confirming the conclusion already reached in David Irving’s The German Atomic Bomb, that the German physicists wanted to build a reactor, but not a bomb. Their secretly recorded comments on Hiroshima have now provided further evidence of their reluctance; Heisenberg apparently regarded it as ...”

“... that sort of picture, as do Dostoevsky’s own letters, a selection of which has been edited by David Goldstein and Frank. The editing is superb, the notes meticulous, but it must be said that Dostoevsky does not come into the category of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. We ...”