“... Gallic crackerbarrel.But it would also be easy to take him at his word. That fairy over his cradle may have brought him a fast eye, but his family gave him the means to exploit it. His father, Henri, owned the eighth biggest fortune in France, and the family lived in a grand and mobile fashion: summer at Deauville and the Channel resorts; winter on the Côte ...”

“... a nearly impregnable barrier to Democratic political success.Reports​ of the party’s demise may be exaggerated. The Democratic presidential candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections (though thanks to the funhouse American electoral system this has translated into just five presidential terms). Yet according to polls a ...”

“... to England by a Captain Daws, ‘his first Master’, and there ‘presented’ to Mrs Turner. He may have already been captive for more than a decade, trapped inside her house in the village of Sudbury. He never learned to speak English. Like a pet animal, he was kept to amuse his jailors, ‘being frequently call’d in to Dance about, and to Sing after his ...”

“... and Sean Connery paired up with Bernard Bresslaw for a Eugene O’Neill two-hander. The programme may have leaned more towards the arts than the sciences, but the recitals, screenings and read-throughs were interspersed with talks on cybernetics, law reform and planar geometry. Advising one of his scientists on how to speak to a room full of artists, Stefan ...”

“... But the bishop was merely reciting the incipit of the Aeneid. ‘Multa ficta.’Brossier may have been a fraud, but what led her down this path? Did she – consciously or otherwise – weigh up the choice between life as an unmarried daughter and the celebrity that might come, however risky, from being possessed? Was her possession ever genuine on a ...”

“... cannot understand the way I feel/Until I rest on lawns of dawns/Can you follow me?’She may have guarded her responses to the point of arrest, but this music is terrifying in its lack of emotional limits. As Cale said, ‘The Marble Index isn’t a record you listen to. It’s a hole you fall into.’ The End includes her elegy for Jim Morrison, who ...”

“... as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours? Indeed he may well still be being widely read as authoritative in some quarters, just as the Le Pens of this world will go on reading Gregory and his modern retailers because it suits their purposes. Ethnicity is ‘impervious to mere rational disproof’. This is why ...”

“... and opening the way to a harmless era of distraction, of Carnaby Street and the Beatles. Thorpe may be right to feel sorry for Eden because he simply found himself ‘on the wrong square of the political chessboard’ at the wrong time, but the whole point about political leadership is to know which square you’re on and to plan ...”

“... her drawings in 1934, though she found them too tortured to hang), but she was not their peer. She may have been too angry for Hemingway, but she was too wifely for professional writers. Yet in 1970 Zelda’s life, not the careers of her successful contemporaries, became, potentially, our own. Nancy Milford’s extraordinary biography gripped and chilled young ...”

“... his own country, and none of the work published in his lifetime was written in France. Descartes may have renounced his family, but he nevertheless bore their stamp and never forgot who he was. One of the properties he sold in the 1620s was a small farm called Le Perron, and in later life he intermittently styled himself sieur du Perron, possibly, as Watson ...”

“... got to when her sense of her own rightness began to override her sense of external reality. It may be too simple to say, as Clare Short said, quoting an unnamed Tory, that ‘no one ever leaves Downing Street entirely sane.’ But there is a moment in most premierships when it is clear that the external world no longer counts quite as much in the Prime ...”

“... their dogs at the Game Fair at Broadlands yesterday.’ It looks as though the counter-revolution may now be ...”

“... as incompatible with a notion of theory as having to be implanted by an avant-garde. The workers may come to see that they are exploited, but they will hardly come to grasp the finer details of surplus value or the Asiatic mode of production merely by feeling hard done by. Mechanical materialism must be resisted: insurrection is an art, a semi-intuitive ...”

“... Thomson concludes: ‘We could note several things from this: that one man’s carnal ecstasy may be another’s imagination; that sometimes there are no excuses; and that the language of self-inducing cinematic exultation is oddly akin to the rhetoric of fascism.’ Sheer joy. And as for Roberto Benigni’s god-help-us-all Oscar-winning La Vita è ...”

“... the historical figure, is the sort of woman whose reputation is so tarnished that any liberty may be taken with her. As she remarked when she found that the Duchess of Beaufort had read her private letters, it is ‘dishonourable and dishonest: at least it would have been called so if I had done it’. The initial motive for writing the Memoirs was ...”