“... 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 ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... optimism of some of the earlier reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass ...”

“... and ill-will one may suspect them to be. There is a tenacity in Lewes as ‘an old-fashioned French barber or dancing master’, or Forster as ‘the toady of Sir E.L. Bulwer and Mr Macready’, which has not made the difficult project of embracing their careers any more attractive. The two books which have taken up these long-standing biographical ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... occupying powers a set of tasks. Creating a counter-narcotics directorate fell to the UK. (The French train the officer corps, the Germans train the border police, the Japanese try to get the warlords to disarm and Italy is charged with building the judiciary.) The poppy question might now be moving up the list of priorities, however. The first signs came ...”

“... contracts. ‘More important for France than the back debt would be oil contracts . . . The French oil giant Total has been negotiating to explore and develop two sites in Iraq,’ the Washington Post noted on 17 December. In Berlin, the commitment Baker won was vaguer, perhaps because Germany has less interest in oil contracts. Asked about the ...”

“... making nonsense of many passages that follow. (The original distinction survives in the French translation, Ciel de nuit: ‘avait du sang nègre’.) In his posthumous memoir, Kafka Was the Rage (1993), Broyard avoids referring to his black family, who lived outside Manhattan. A facile view is that he was ashamed of being black; an alternative one ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before the war by the museum authorities at the behest of Saddam. Two days later, in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch seconded Cruickshank, and right-wing commentators in the US took up the story. Later that month, many of the same media figures used part of a statement by Donny George, the director of the Iraq Museum, to bury the story that had embarrassed the ...”