“... visible to us.Is the colossus protecting the people, or is it him they fear? Does he symbolise the French armies wreaking havoc across the Spanish hills or Spain standing up to the invaders? If the giant is Spain, which Spain is he: the Bourbons demanding restoration or the liberal republicanism that flared briefly at the time Goya was ...”

“... Prime Minister, who, as in her invocation of ‘Victorian Values’ – or her strictures on the French Revolution – is continually calling up shades of the national past. Her interventions in the current debate are widely resented and interpreted in a sinister sense, but historians, while rejecting her precepts, might feel nattered and even encouraged by ...”

“... not be able to for many years.’ In the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright and Mark Hibbs analysed the situation and found several areas of nuclear weapon technology in which Iraq was deficient quite apart from its lack of usable fissile material. Nothing the IAEA inspectors have found so far in any way suggests that Iraq ...”

“... Gay has found so much unfamiliar material from so many provenances – English, American, French and German – that his book will be a major resource for fellow historians for a long time. He makes an important remark about the relation between his evidence and his conclusions at the outset of Education of the Senses: ‘The search for ...”

“... here is not really original – it probably owes a good deal to A High Wind in Jamaica and The French Lieutenant’s Woman – but it is used with an atmosphere and personality all its own. He makes history extremely funny, and true humour always sounds authentic. Young Fleury, the clever young man of fashion from England, who finds himself involved in the ...”

“... and others said about its intrinsic Englishness, was certainly a Continental and probably a French invention, but it was Brown who carried it to perfection and sent it back across the Channel as an integral part of the jardin anglais, in which open views across country and sloping lawns could be divided on the ground, while united to the eye. In his ...”

“... civility – attended by men and women anxious to ‘improve’ – rather than of vice. He begged David Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did ...”

“... Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be ...”

“... is dedicated to Quintana. The reference in the title is to a colour of evening light – ‘the French called this time of day “l’heure bleue”.’ You see it first in late April when ‘suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise,’ but only in certain latitudes: in New York, for example, where Didion now lives, but not in ...”

“... country of origin is ‘refoulement’ (to push back or repulse) which also happens to be the French word for the psychoanalytic concept of repression. As if somewhere it is being acknowledged that returning a migrant to the country from which they fled is not only inhumane (and most likely illegal under international law), but also straitjackets their ...”

“... It was the moment, in the mid-1950s, when worlds were beginning to collide. Tennant’s uncle David ran the louche but artistic Gargoyle Club in Soho, where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... take up a quieter life. But once Il Magnifico was dead and his son Piero was in charge – with French troops bearing down on the city and Savonarola preaching in the pulpit – not even the philosophers were safe. Pico and his friend Angelo Poliziano were assassinated. Pico was 31. Their bodies were exhumed in 2007 and poisoning by arsenic confirmed (in ...”

“... an underrated pleasure. It is like an evening spent in a restaurant – let’s say Olwen’s French Club, mentioned on page one, a latterday refuge of the Chelsea set – listening to a story of mutual friends. And it is a trip in its own right, on the teller’s part. T. Behrens gives the impression that he has more to say about himself than the ...”