“... of the sea: in Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Marseille is mentioned so often that when you turn to its entry in the book’s index, you find no page numbers, just a word – passim. Lauso la mare e tente’n terro – praise the sea and stay on the land – is a Provençal proverb, and Marseille ...”

“... to remember the name of the photographer I’d known here back in the early 1980s: Caucasian French, born in Oran, with a stack of monochrome prints of boxers and jazz musicians, and a great eye for subjects of African descent. In 2011 the Chelsea, which took its first occupant in 1884, was sold to a developer as prime Manhattan real estate – it’s on ...”

“... In Politics and the Pound, Philip Stephens has produced a book which should be required reading for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are studying it carefully. They can legitimately enjoy the more egregious mistakes made by the Tories since 1979, but they should be sparing with their scorn ...”

“... Lady Diana Cooper is capable of saying anything, if she thinks you are dumb enough to swallow it. Philip Ziegler has reason to consider himself astute, but he perhaps ruled out too soon the possibility that the queen of the put-on had spotted the ideal patsy. The chief lacuna in an otherwise interesting book is its failure adequately to convey the heroine’s ...”

“... of his career only two years before, the septuagenarian’s military expertise had stopped a rival French royal line seizing the throne of England. His wife does not lie beside him: it would have been indecorous to bury her here in this house of warrior-celibates, whose ranks William had formally joined as he lay dying at Caversham, saying goodbye to her and ...”

“... better results than violence against them. When force worked, no one – not the English, the French or the Spanish – was reluctant to use it, as Timucuans, Pequots, Wampanoags and Natchez could all have testified. Thousands of these peoples not only died: they often died cruelly and gruesomely. North America in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries was no ...”

“... went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of newly-available sources, including revelations of the significant part played by Ultra intelligence in the later stages of the North African campaigns. Colonel John Auchinleck ...”

“... Who broke the Vase of Soissons? Once, every French school child would have known the answer to that question, as they would have known that their ancestors were Gauls with blue eyes and blond hair (they knew this even if they were learning their lessons in Africa or the West Indies); that Charlemagne had a flowing white beard and cared about education (but he may have been most popular because his coronation date, 800, was so easy to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many Protestants; that Henri IV wanted every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sundays ...”

“... history of its cafés, and there is no doubt that the cafés play a large part in the history of French sociabilité. But the very availability of the French café to everyone, in contrast to the exclusiveness of London clubs, considerably reduces its significance in terms of ideas or of intellectual exchange. It would, no ...”

“... up in Alsace between the wars, Ungerer couldn’t avoid the influence of Hansi, a local artist and French propagandist during the period of Prussian rule which followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, a time when most Alsatians were largely indifferent to Kulturpolitik. Ungerer’s work most resembles Hansi’s in his illustrations to Das grosse Liederbuch ...”

“... of the house was enchanting down even to the shape of the seat-backs. But the stern sounds of Philip II’s monologue from Verdi’s Don Carlos brought back the reality of the situation. ‘She has never loved me,’ Philip sings of his wife Elisabeth de Valois. So might Russia sing of Armenia. Russia helped Armenia ...”

“... and literary criticism, journalism and writing for the theatre. (I used also to translate from French, German and Italian, but gave that up some time ago as a mug’s game. I once insisted on a royalty arrangement, instead of a fee, for a book I translated from German: after some years I received a cheque for about £4.) I was surprised, a few days ago, to ...”

“... transcriptions of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita at the time. Or it may be symptomatic of the French interest in the English pastoral. Delacroix visited England in 1825, meeting both Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington; the trip inspired his outdoor portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, which Degas later bought for his private collection. Degas’s own ...”

“... and only an Act of Parliament had returned her to it. When Mary was a teenager, married to the French dauphin, Henry II of France declared her not only queen of Scots (as she had been since the death of her father, James V, when she was six days old), but queen of England and Ireland too. The show includes a sketch of Mary’s ‘false arms’ – ...”

“... Poetry and Poets, ‘can a book of criticism be at once so distinguished and so unimportant?’ Of Philip Larkin’s comparable and incomparable ‘miscellaneous pieces’, it might be asked: How can a book of criticism be at once so un-‘distinguished’ and so important? But then how can this Faber book of groans be so exhilarating? The open unsecret is: by ...”