“... slide into imperialism. Later generations used Macaulay’s arguments to justify British – or French, German and most recently American – territorial, economic and cultural colonialism: liberal imperialism, as it became called. His other main legacy was the way his particular interpretation of English history ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”

“... is without precedent. This is the argument of More and More and More, the latest book by the French historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the ...”

“... or that its history mirrors that of Jewish migrations, is a trope of modern antisemitism. As David Nirenberg put it in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), the association of Judaism with worldliness and money is ‘as ancient as Christianity itself’. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance ...”

“... that to accuse an ugly man of adultery was like charging an invalid with assault. All this led the French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant to conclude that the Greek body was best seen, not as a lump of meat, temporarily animated by the soul, but as a source of energy and light, a corps éclatant. When the body was at its best, powerful attributes played over ...”

“... Now ... Nay.’ ‘Nausea,’ I interjected, sinking into my shirt. ‘It’s Existentialist. By a French author.’ ‘Oh awa you and read books!’ he said, getting a bit red in the face. ‘Awa tae university or somethin’. It’s a wee lassie am lookin’ fur.’ We thought he was probably quite mad, and not at all attuned to the new way of doing ...”

“... in New Verse – ‘My only knowledge of Surrealism is derived from Mr Gascoyne’s books, a few French writers like Breton and Aragon, some paintings of Dali, Ernst and others, and from the pages of the Minotaur’). The writing is slick and smooth, well-egged and oiled, with a tang and a hint of salt, like a good mayonnaise. His two finest moments come in ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous one, the brothers of George III, must have run them pretty close. George behaved like a ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... There is a good answer in the argument James conducted with W.K. Clifford, brilliantly explored by David Hollinger in an essay in The Cambridge Companion to William James. Clifford had said that it is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence, a claim James thought ‘thoroughly fantastic’ because it excluded most human action most of the ...”

“... too had a friend called Beamish, Noelle Beamish, an Irish lesbian lady who lived in the same French village during the war and left her long, utilitarian drawers out to dry beside her younger companion’s little frilly knickers. On the way back I know that I will miss lunch in the Conrad so I turn, hardly thinking at all, into the new foyer of the ...”

“... only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies. In Paris he was a celebrity. French writers and American expatriates flocked to the Café Monaco, where he held court a short walk from his Left Bank flat. ‘Dick greeted everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king ...”

“... on the make, Raffles wanted to make up for lost time. He took part in the invasion of French-controlled Java in 1811 and ruled it for three years as lieutenant-governor. With a talent for engineering inter-elite intrigues and massacres, he made considerable headway in bringing the sultans of the island to submission. He ransacked the ancient city ...”