“... was a poor speaker. He also had terrible stomach problems in later life, perhaps because of the French chef he always took around with him. (At one point he could eat only Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John Singer Sargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. He ...”

“... his eventual aspirations as a free man – which range from being a good Christian to learning the French horn. Equiano stayed with the godly and genteel Guerin sisters in Greenwich, and took ‘many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’. He tried training as a hairdresser in the Haymarket, he went to evening classes to learn ...”

“... could be put up in his spare room. Ivano agreed, delighted to learn that his uninvited guest spoke French. They went horseback riding in the morning and found they couldn’t stop talking. ‘He stayed two weeks, which was all right. I bought the food and he cooked it. He was a good cook. And we became friends.’ Eventually, ‘Rudy invited Paul Ivano to ...”

“... making the proposal, Frances Stevenson, the daughter of a Scottish accountant and his part-French, part-Italian wife, did so. I can see why. It isn’t just that I’ve always had a soft spot for Lloyd George, who was a flesh and blood human being, and not one of those conscience-laden stick-figures in morning coats that the Edwardian Liberal Party ...”

“... monolithic status of holy writ, in response to what they saw as Protestant fundamentalism. As the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon remarked early on in a book that became a subversive classic among Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘the Books of the Bible that are come into our hands are but abridgments of the ancient Records, which were more full and ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... under their gaze. Why should Hebrew be thought to have any more ‘integrity’ than French or English? It is like any normal language: full of ‘foreign’ elements, dating from ancient Persian to Post-Modern American. Modern Hebrew isn’t even modelled on Biblical Hebrew, though we are all supposed to believe it is. Syntactically, it has been ...”

“... says admiringly. Hundreds if not thousands of books came back across the Channel, of which (says David Dumville) maybe eleven can be identified. One of the books imported was an enormous Old Latin Bible from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. It has not survived, but served as a format-model for the great Codex Amiatinus written at the twin foundations of ...”

“... because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later colonial wars by Saul David) – neither author romanticises his subject to any great degree. Both are good on the daily lives of 18th and early 19th-century soldiers, and on the boring periods between battles. They mention (and Latimer has quite a bit about) the many women ...”

“... able to command the support of much of western Wales, had secured a treaty of friendship with the French, and had even enlisted two important English nobles, Sir Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, into the rebellion. He wrote to Pope Benedict XIII, exiled in Avignon, seeking approval for a plan to restore Welsh law and to elevate the ...”

“... of 1688 and its aftermath, banking, commercial and industrial transformations, the American and French revolutions, the Enlightenment and the coming of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Most of the economic changes appear to have affected Oxford only indirectly, but the American and French revolutions brought the University ...”

“... by being forced to give up untrammelled power in England as he had by the loss of most of his French empire to Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bouvines the year before. The meadow had been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day – ‘Runny’ comes from the same root as ‘rune’ or ...”

“... insoluble substance rather like starch accumulate between cells in the brain. In the 19th century, French doctors adopted the term plaque for various inexplicable patches that appeared on tissue, as in multiple sclerosis (sclérose en plaques). Plaques show up in many diseases, and we seldom know why. Rose explains that Alzheimer’s is a matter of ...”

“... his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like that! I ...”

“... about how to use Milner in our daily lives: Emilia Halton-Hernandez’s The Marion Milner Method, David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity and Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure, forthcoming this spring, which is described as a book about ‘experiments in living with Marion Milner’. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of these books ...”