“... 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 ...”

“... the reader should have had at the start about the biographer and her purposes. Wagner, a French-trained Polish sociologist, is not a ‘Baumanist’, and her sociological training in Paris didn’t expose her to his work. Bauman was ‘neither my guru nor my friend’, she writes. Arthur missed a trick here, since Wagner doesn’t mean, as an English ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... held for the best students – to Deerfield’s ‘resident writer’, a not very able poet called David Morton, who was so impressed that he sent them to Poetry magazine, which accepted two of them. The poems appeared in the November 1945 issue. Ashbery was distracted from noticing their publication by the fear he would be expelled for homosexuality, but he ...”

“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

“... but at least no one raps in it, though you get the sense that Ben Franklin might have tried – in French. However, there are two scenes that flare to life. The first comes during ‘Momma Look Sharp’, which is sung by a 15-year-old boy, slain by the British, who lies in the killing fields and who will not rise again after the victory. This song seems to ...”

“... a companion than a child, taking him on their European travels, where he offered advice in fluent French to famous painters – Meissonier, Bonnat, Carolus-Duran – and had an audience with the pope. At thirteen he began collecting antiquities for a projected museum. And at fifteen he died, felled by typhoid in Florence, in March 1884.In accordance with his ...”

“... first, they intervened in Buganda when a civil war broke out between three factions, followers of French (Catholic) and English (Protestant) missionaries, and Muslim supporters of Kabaka Muwanga, tipping the balance in favour of the English-aligned faction; then they drafted most of Buganda’s adult population into military service and set about subduing ...”

“... Once to be had in Leeds Market for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close ...”

“... far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and intelligence system. The detonation of British and French nuclear weapons on Pacific atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... citizens of the Commonwealth in 1948. In his documentary The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, David Olusoga observed that the 1948 British Nationality Act was intended to attract Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who would be easily absorbed into the majority population, restoring Britain’s manpower after the war, while keeping it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”