“... Anglicans went, so did their prayer book. A heroic work of chronological listings published by David Griffiths in 2002 rounded up about 4800 editions of the Prayer Book or of liturgies stemming from its Scottish and American derivatives; around 1200 of these are in 199 other languages, ranging from the Acholi of Uganda to Zulu. Griffiths demonstrated that ...”

“... ceased to be one, it was a capital of the 19th century and of modernity. Sartre writes that the French were probably most free under Nazi occupation. You feel something similar, but on an incomparably larger scale, when you survey the curiously munificent and playful texts and artwork that Bengal produced from the 1860s to the 1970s. Tagore repeatedly ...”

“... to be them,’ but she didn’t know how, so instead of that, she ‘made it’ once with David Johansen, the Dolls’ lead singer, and drove the band around, together with their girlfriends, in her father’s turquoise Buick.It was while she was following the Dolls around that Harry met Elda Gentile, who had the idea of forming a band called Pure ...”

“... worth going a little into the general question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist ...”

“... also themselves subject to violence from the left, which created martyrs still celebrated today. A French TV report on the 1996 election shows Meloni organising a group of young activists, almost all men, in Garbatella. Wearing a black leather jacket, she tells the reporter in passable French that Mussolini had been a good ...”

“... rotting in the grass: the deeper identity structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an ...”

“... responded with tear gas. ‘The foreigners wouldn’t move. There were Americans, Italians and French. The soldiers got out of the tank to pull people away. They kicked them, but they could not get through. We effectively opened the road for a few hours.’ The checkpoint was moved closer to Ramallah with the result that students and teachers had a longer ...”

“... orthodox training to a Marxian research programme: to explain the course of capitalism since the French and Industrial Revolutions, no less, and to glimpse its future itinerary, with special reference to inequalities of income and wealth. By the age of 22, knowing ‘nothing about the world’s economic problems’, as he confesses, Piketty had produced a ...”

“... sick. For the first time, I noticed quite how pretty, and quite how nervous, she was. She was French, she was 19, and she had, she told me, a brother in the Free French navy. As I was slowly undressing, struggling with my Sam Browne, she picked up a silver-framed photograph from the dressing-table, and, giving it a ...”

“... once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure.’ 17 February. Catch part of BBC2’s celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first ...”

“... own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial resistance. Rage, political and personal, took her yet further, to the assassins of 12th-century Persia, the nihilists of 19th-century Russia. I ...”

“... illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... a rehabilitation of spiritualism.’ Spinozism was part of this: ‘the latest example of French totalism, a product of the nostalgia for the universalising vocation of the French intelligentsia, seeking new grounds to assert the prerogatives of its historical role, refusing to allow itself to be consigned to ...”

“... and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying ...”