“... millions can never be comprehended by a single person.’ They also typify the difference between English and French intellectual approaches. The very title of Robb’s Parisians announces that it is going to be based on people rather than thesis or theory; while its craftily alluring subtitle ‘An Adventure History of Paris’ seems to hint at Jules Verne ...”

“... British voyage to the South Seas returned with a striking Ra’iātean called Mai (known to the English as ‘Omai’). Banks introduced him to London society, and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny ...”

“... fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.As Richard Holmes’s 1974 biography showed with such intelligence and affection, Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an ...”

“... an Irishman’s unconscious equation of Ireland with a virgin and thus of the six counties with an English penis). Why should we suppose that Jones was any less idiotic when he left the public domain? Hopkins deplores criticism like Popper’s which uses invented examples, and asks us to consider ‘such real and testing examples of behaviour as are provided ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in a ...”

“... trial, massacre, impoverishment and exile. All for him to join the dictators’ club? For Wales, Richard, for Wales? Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, brought his children up with the illusion that he would win title to stolen ancestral property in Egypt. In pursuit of the elusive inheritance, Abdel Raouf, a mild man in a fez with oversize ...”

“... and their shadows crossing and concealing each other at startling angles and with enticing effect. Richard Symonds, a couple of decades after Caravaggio’s death, wrote of the Cupid that ‘’twas the body & face of his owne boy or servant that laid with him’ and that his name was ‘Checco’ (that is, Cecco). Robb commends the boy for supplying his hero ...”

“... more to those discussed here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at ...”

“... for electoral reasons. The desirability of owning one’s house has a long history in all English-speaking countries and there are good social arguments for private ownership. But there is a thin line between social desirability and political calculation, and Thatcher crossed it with complete insouciance. The mandatory sale of council housing was ...”

“... lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of record’: Sir Richard Burton ‘had done exactly that again and again’. Merchant was educated at St Xavier’s College in Bombay before leaving for the US in 1958, and was clearly not so sceptical about colonialist claims of conducting a mission civilisatrice in the way that ...”

“... in the decade. By 1950 change was coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English in 1953. There were increasing opportunities for women who were bold and determined enough to take them. Yet for all Cooke’s justified satisfaction in finding so many possible subjects from which to make her selection, the cumulative effect is to ...”

“... autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he would ...”

“... to the unfolding national crisis. Ponderings II-VI, the first volume to be translated into English, covers the period from 1931 to 1938 (the notebook from 1930 has not been found). It is in 1931 that Heidegger first begins to notice a change, and ‘the political stirring of the young people’. He feels their ‘desire to come again onto a ...”

“... 19th century. Gradgrindism, as they might have said, was no accident. When, a few years later, an English translation of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature appeared with an introduction by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a close associate at Cambridge, the group felt that at last they had the theoretical tools they needed. Life could not be reduced to mere ...”

“... minutes of the Assembly, his 36-man delegation included ‘Arabs, Chaldaeans, Prussians, Poles, English, Swiss, Germans, Dutchmen, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, Americans, Indians, Syrians, Brabaçons, Liégeois, Avignonnais, Genevans’. Moved by their entreaties, the deputies not only reserved a special place for foreigners at the celebrations on 14 ...”