“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And the writing has such crooked vitality: the vernacular bumping against the spoilt, jaunty French, the slap of the phrases. What is most appealing is the quality of self-mockery. It is hard not to feel that Lawrence finds himself as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic ...”

“... won the day. To cite Berlin’s own litany, we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby ...”

“... involvement as an intermediary in the marriage negotiations between Mary Mountjoy, daughter of the French Protestant family with whom Shakespeare lodged near the Barbican in 1604, and their apprentice, Stephen Belott (who subsequently obliged Shakespeare to testify in a lawsuit over the non-payment of £60 supposedly promised to him as a dowry). Beyond this at ...”

“... violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption’. According to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, after the fall of Saddam the Iraqis succumbed to their native ‘demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise … even in the face of self-immolation’. Liberal hawks such as Leon Wieseltier believe much the same ...”

“... gods.’ Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Moravia, started writing poems under the influence of French Surrealism. The poems quickly squared their shoulders and became paragraphs: prose poems, epiphanic jottings, broken anecdotes. The Prague Revue (No. 5) recently printed a number of these early poems, written in the 1940s, and many of them are touched with ...”

“... about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... off Norway with quota to spare only to get a message from his company saying that because a French vessel had overfished, the Norwegians were cutting the quota of another EEC boat – which happened to be his. The only way he could cover his costs was to take his trawler into the perilous waters of the Arctic, above the 72nd parallel.Hardie doesn’t ...”