“... in a house across the pasture. Lisa Marie adored her Southern family; the fried chicken, grits and French fries that the Graceland chefs would make at any hour of the day; the stormy weather that seemed to reflect her father’s changing moods. In this telling, Elvis is gregarious, nocturnal, prone to volcanic rages and tender gestures. Lisa Marie is a tiny ...”

“... the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Merkel has moved successfully to circumvent the will of French and Dutch voters, but was in no position to accomplish this on her own: for that, governments in Paris and the Hague were necessary. The prospects of any informal German hegemony in Europe, classically considered, seem at present remote. Part of the reason ...”

“... of the capitalist world? Set beside the Dutch Revolt, America’s War of Independence, the French Revolution, Italy’s Risorgimento, the unification of Germany, let alone the Meiji restoration in Japan, the overthrow of the English monarchy seems of a different order: not a modern starting-point of institutional development, more an exotic ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... packet of tampons; a plastic bag containing white granules like coarse salt, with instructions in French; a liquid soap dispenser; three pairs of women’s pants; a bag of cotton-wool balls; a pink sock; two child-sized pairs of jeans; a pink top next to trousers and a towel in the same colour; a bedspread with red and yellow hearts on it; a green plastic ...”

“... classified as lithophytes (stony plants) by Linnaeus in the early 18th century. Then, in 1752, the French ‘physician-botanist’ Jean-André Peyssonnel sent a treatise to the Royal Society from Guadeloupe. Peyssonnel showed that corals were not, despite appearances, plants, but colonies of tiny animals. As one reader noted with admiration, Peyssonel’s work ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... orthodoxy and censoriousness, impartially including ‘Madame Vendler’s Chamber of Horrors’, French theory, and ‘the deformed, uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism’. It opposes them, much less specifically, with what would appear a libertarian, childlike, very late Romantic poetry of ‘the body’, ‘the voice’ and ‘the new ...”

“... link that binds John Major, via the Desert Rats, to Desert Storm. It is easy to find news of the French, the Kuwaitis and other participants in Bush’s international brigade – or is it General Schwartzkopf’s, since Bush, in a chilling moment, announced that he would leave the conduct of the war to the military? Of the poor Brits, we hear barely a ...”

“... chiefly with altarpieces and altarpieces must also play a central part in any history of Italian, French or Spanish art of the three centuries which followed. It is therefore surprising that, before the translation of Burckhardt’s essay, Das Altarbild, there was no book in English tracing the origins and early evolution of this art form, and describing its ...”

“... wakened by the growl of thunder and lightning.’ Into this ghostly idyll come two men: first, David Caravaggio, a friend of Hana’s father from before the war in Toronto; and later, a young sapper, Kirpal Singh, nicknamed Kip – a Sikh from the Punjab, who has been detailed to clear the area around the villa of mines. Caravaggio and Kip materialise like ...”

“... barren situation. Without orders, valuable resources and expertise would simply wither away. The French would never dream of allowing any such situation in their own domestic manufacturing industry. In Scotland we are already 45 per cent dependent on nuclear-generated electricity, and this will rise to 60 per cent when Torness in East Lothian comes on ...”

“... of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an artist, the more apparent it becomes that he was not the bon sauvage he was portrayed to ...”

“... action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character.’ It was thus that, whereas French was his language as an intellectual, English (for all of Ford’s would-be-Gallic complaints of its unsuitability for literature) was his chosen language as an artist. It need not surprise us, therefore, that the qualities which he embraced ...”

“... scholars from Central Europe, and it was ‘taken for granted’ that students could read Latin, French, Italian and German. Strong ‘struggled’. There were grave doubts about his ambition to study Elizabethan portraits. In the end his thesis was on court pageantry. Over the years he remained committed to his research but found the Warburg in general, and ...”