“... and my job was to promote Anglo-German relations.Had you done German at school?No, not at all. French and Latin, I’d done. In Germany I had to write the scripts for a radio programme; I had to write local-boy stories, stories which commemorated a proud day in the life of Blank from Blank. Such and such a grand person came to visit etc, and then you took ...”

“... for lending the sovereign a great deal of gold, in the first instance to build a navy to fight the French, the Bank of England acquired the right to print paper money. That paper money could then be used by ordinary people to pay their taxes. It’s at this point that banks, money and the modern state become fused together. The money system and the banks and ...”

“... in some of the poetic, theoretical talk in the best of these coffee-table tomes, the Polish-French photographer Nicolas Grospierre’s Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture. ‘For me,’ Grospierre insists, ‘modernism, and architectural modernism in particular, is the embodiment of one of the greatest ideas in the history of ...”

“... system safer, the answer again is that we don’t really know. As the financial historian David Marsh observed, the only way you can properly test a firewall is by having a fire. I think the ring-fence is an opportunity missed. That goes for a lot of the small complicated rules designed to make banks and the financial system safer. Bankers complain ...”

“... and Forster’s mother, but Bess quickly got jealous and forbade ‘Tom’ to go to any more ‘French lessons’ at the Forsters’, timed while Lily was out shopping. The following year, though, Forster notes, ‘Tom came at last – but says his name is Dudley.’ Further encounters follow: ‘Tom 4 in all’; ‘Lust + goodwill – is anything more ...”

“... given the primitive acoustic equipment (the original recording was made in 1903), the fabled French actress sounds like Minnie Mouse on speed. She gabbles her way through ‘Oui, Prince, je brûle pour Thésée’ at a mad, cartoonish pace, ’r’s unrolling wildly in every direction. (Watch your head!) The reviewer dotes on her deranged-chipmunk ...”

“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... and come upon the war memorial. It’s of a soldier, solid and even squat, looking as much French as English and though it’s strictly representational with something of Vorticism about it, like a three-dimensional version of the figures that populate the paintings of William Roberts. There’s a reluctance about the soldier, too, the heaviness of the ...”

“... before the launch of the NHS’s new technology arm, NHSX, Mosley hosted a meal attended by David Prior, chair of NHS England. Documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism show that Mosley emailed Prior the next day, thanking him for coming. Prior replied that evening: ‘Louis, Thank you for hosting such an interesting dinner and also ...”

“... that a new sort of liberal polity demanded the rejection of absolutist forms of punishment. (The French Constitution of 1791, which created a short-lived constitutional monarchy, got rid of the death penalty entirely except for treason.) By the middle years of the 19th century, the debate on capital punishment in the US had a more explicitly republican tone ...”

“... Chester Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...”

“... precisely thanks to postmodernism. That’s the idea behind Borges’s story of Pierre Menard, a French Symbolist who is led by his Symbolist background to produce a text identical to Don Quixote. Borges’s story, however, relies on our historical knowledge of Cervantes’s existence. The incredibly funny, thought-provoking claim that ‘Cervantes’s text ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... Russian rabbinate had historically supported the anti-semitic Tsar against Bonaparte, viewing the French as bearers of secularism and enlightenment. The other is that he saw, in the attachment of many Jewish intellectuals to Marxism, a sort of displaced messianic impulse. This certainly aided his persistent misreading of Marx and of what he thought of as ...”

“... nodding out for days at a time, blissfully insensible to the strangulated yips of their miniature French poodle, Bijou, no one would hire him. He started doing solo hold-ups and boosts to keep them supplied, cruising past East LA construction sites and making off with unguarded power tools. He got caught with a condom full of dope after one of these farcical ...”