“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... don’t lose their passport in the process. Rodgers goes on to address the Marxist arguments of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, which hold that postmodern cultural fragmentation is connected to the shift from the Fordist national economies of the first part of the 20th century to the post-Fordist global economy of the last part. In the Marxist view, the ...”

“... synchronised with the biblical narrative, and the problem had sharpened in 1655, when the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère published his Prae-Adamitae, alleging that the annals of other civilisations, including the American and the Chinese, went back far beyond the creation of Adam around 4000 BC. It followed, according to La Peyrère, that these ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... He was even against Parliamentary and electoral reform. Indeed, to William Lamb, as the great French historian Elie Halévy put it, ‘reform of any kind seemed impossible or dangerous.’ As a member of the cabinet which was carrying the Reform Bill through Parliament, Lamb, who was now Lord Melbourne and home secretary throughout the long ...”

“... but the Mathesons’ Continental travels in pursuit of rest cures allowed her to become fluent in French, German and Italian. In 1908 she joined the Society of Home Students in Oxford, where her father was a chaplain, and read for the Honours History School, specialising in the Renaissance. While women were not yet allowed to matriculate, she did well in ...”

“... up to be associated with it. Many of the military leaders of the First World War – Douglas Haig, David Beatty and Hamilton – were there, under the distant and autocratic leadership of Herbert Kitchener. The other great difference in 1898 was that there was no risk of repeating Gambier-Parry’s confusion of 1884. Every soldier and every newspaper reader ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... history. Rosalind’s father, a much anthologised poet called John Grammaticus, has left his French château and come to London to be filmed for a documentary. Daisy is coming to town too, with proofs of her book, My Saucy Bark. Perowne hopes to engineer a truce between his daughter and his father-in-law, who cantankerously poured cold water on her first ...”