“... more self-conscious about his methods: when he started his grand tour, he contemplated writing in French, and on other occasions he debated whether to use the past or the present tense. By comparison Pepys’s linguistic aberrations have an innocent air. It has been pointed out by David Nokes that the Companion is ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... past Qatar preferred soft power prestige investments to buying weapons from the West. (In 2015, David Cameron went to Doha at BAE’s behest to sell British warplanes, and returned empty-handed.) But it discovered to its cost that Western powers would be half-hearted in its defence unless it used some of its $340 billion sovereign wealth fund to buy Western ...”

“... Memorial, Yad Vashem, the Menin Gate and the names in memorial books like Serge Klarsfeld’s French Children of the Holocaust – this abstraction of large numbers, the numerical sublime, demands attention.* These dead. These specific, enumerated dead. Elbert Williams, lynched in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1940 for working to register black votes – and ...”

“... all the seamarks and buoys. He would have to hold out of Calais as well as he could: at least the French were friendly, and they had begun sending him supplies. On the morning of Sunday, 7 August, Effingham’s council of war decided on breaking up the Spanish formation with fireships. By midnight they were ready, eight private ships packed with inflammable ...”

“... years (our present), vanishing into the Cévennes in the company of his long-lost (illegitimate) French granddaughter. Theo Wuttke’s destiny is promising in the same way as the destiny of those characters in Balzac who lived through the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, is promising: their lifelines serve as Geiger ...”

“... The most notable New York venues in that era were probably the Sanctuary and the Loft, home to DJ David Mancuso. Saturday Night For Ever includes some enthusiastic reminiscences of the gay scene in London: the drugs, the songs and the very late nights. The camp, glam impulses behind the upsurge in gay clubbing influenced the image of disco in the ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... people was no part of the equation. Nor did the Glorious Revolution stem the tide. The ban on French goods of 1693-96 lasted nearly a century, until the Eden Act of 1786. Import duties of between 10 and 20 per cent were devised to pay for the war with France and began to create the tariff wall that was to endure into the 19th century. These duties were ...”

“... would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ the historian David Wright says. ‘Even people who worked in the Ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science fiction stuffon the TV; they dreamed, too. But there were people, and perhaps the same people, who had to make hard-headed decisions about what would pay ...”

“... read its rival the Observer, or the Boston Globe, or the South China Morning Post. Or, if your French was up to it, a newspaper like Le Monde that was actually based in Paris. Most threateningly to the old media establishment, you could dip into them all. The ordinary reader could become not exactly their own editor but their own news curator, summoning ...”

“... Don’t meddle in the election,’ he says, waving a finger in a mock scolding. Putin smiles.The French slyly release a video of Ivanka waving her hands as she tries to enter into a conversation among Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Christine Lagarde, who grimaces. It is reported that a ‘friendship tree’, given months earlier by Macron ...”