“... 20th century, the panda was largely unknown to science. The first European to describe it was the French Catholic missionary Armand David, who saw the skin of a black and white bear on display in a house in western China in 1869. He contracted some local hunters to capture and kill one, and sent the body back to Paris so it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not varied – with a pathos so homely and total that it brings tears to the eyes. Beckett and Pinter have nothing on Patrick Hamilton at his best: in fact, beside him they seem ...”

“... where we left off: ah, those samba Brazilians, possessional Spaniards, disciplined Germans, elite French not considered French by many French, joyous Senegalese, inexhaustible South Koreans, tragic Dutch, hapless English, even more hapless Scots and inexplicably absent Italians. The ...”

“... he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...”

“... extraordinarily rendered into the North Circular Road hinterland, was the Deptford percussionist David Aylward. His strident hi-vis disguise, colour co-ordinated with the favours of the London Overground, had been made for a French hunter who wanted to stand out when the bullets were flying in some seasonal avian ...”

“... thinking reflected instead a deep hatred and suspicion of the Russians on the one hand and the French on the other. Adrian Fort, in his new biography, argues persuasively that ‘on European matters a paramount influence upon Nancy seemed to be an aversion to the French’ and to ‘Latins in general’. As for the idea ...”

“... from a loose identification with the Workers’ Party to becoming a behind-the-scenes adviser to David Trimble in his brave attempt to bring Unionism to the middle ground of power-sharing with a domesticated Sinn Féin. Bew is allegedly the originator of the pithy identification of Trimble’s desired power base as ‘the Prod in the garden centre’; the ...”

“... disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on the centrality of the French avant-garde. Even as social and psychological readings were extended and deepened, the modern transformation of pictorial representation was credited to a celebrated line of painters from Courbet to Cézanne (with a few less well-known names like Mary ...”