“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter ...”

“... are fairly recent. It has long been assumed that the niceties of theory are congenial to French Cartesians, and to Americans, whose literature, in any case, floats free of terrestrial commitment, but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen ...”

“... Eisenhower (although he had refused, against his advisers’ counsel, to come to the aid of the French at Dien Bien Phu) or forward onto Johnson (although ‘Johnson’s war’ was enlarged and prosecuted by Kennedy appointees claiming to represent the late President’s will, and Bobby himself did not go over to the Peace side until 1966). In any case, it ...”

“... isolationist. German scholarship was much admired and emulated in the 19th century, as were French art and literature and Italian music. But political theory: no thank you. Britain had no need of doctrine, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary; nor, since there appeared to be no problem of the state, a doctrine of the state. Those writers who were ...”

“... overall failure, Motion himself supplies the required epitaph: ‘At a time when many English, French and Spanish contemporaries filtered the lessons of their predecessors through distinctly modern sensibilities, George remained studiously traditional. He chose revivalism where they opted for pastiche; he preferred lavish reduplication where they ...”

“... gentleman who inherited the income which supported his scholarship in 1776, lived through the French Revolution and shared all his friend Burke’s worst fears about the direction world affairs seemed to have taken in those years, Malone was naturally inclined to feel rather paranoid in the climate of the mid-1790s. His Introduction to the Inquiry makes ...”

“... wearied journalist wanted time to do justice to his subject. He’d been binging on a raft of French stuff (Lacan, Barthes, Derrida) because he couldn’t find anything of interest in contemporary English letters. He had a savagely allergic reaction to the productions of the Norwich School, Malcolm Bradbury’s over-eager cadets who were then consummating ...”

“... Place, and sometimes worked together on a single picture. During the Blitz they drank at the French pub in Soho, cycled out during air raids and climbed over ruins on bombsites. Sometimes they went to the home of Freud’s late grandfather, which was not yet the Freud Museum, and took turns to lie on the famous couch.The blackout was convenient for ...”

“... in Bruges, were in Sicily. Antonello would also have seen avant-garde Flemish and Southern French painting in Naples, where he appears to have studied with Niccolò Antonio Colantonio, the city’s leading painter, sometime after 1445.Colantonio is known as a copyist of Van Eyck, so Antonello’s first encounter was probably one of these works. Other ...”

“... was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to the firm rather than McChrystal himself ...”

“... have been explained diplomatically, as the Henrician regime sought to counter the danger of a French-Imperial alliance by negotiating with the German Lutheran princes; and politically, as reformers and conservatives jostled for control of the king’s mind and conscience, Cranmer and Cromwell versus Bishop Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk. Bernard ...”