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“... and economy and that can encompass and evoke a range of themes and moods. The poetic register of Linda France in Red is no less disciplined but more copious and conversational. It enables her both to explore the everyday and to enter more esoteric zones, as at the start of ‘Dutch Interior’: Let’s say this light-filled space is the Netherlands And ...”

“... One may be able to take a white horse anywhere: how far Napoleon can still be taken – even in France – is less clear. Up to the First World War, the strength or weakness of Bonapartism was usually a potent indicator of how French men and women responded to their nation. Thus Napoleon’s improved reputation in the 1830s (his body was brought back in ...”

“... in the 16th century. There were two reasons for this. First, newly-powerful princes in Italy, France, Spain and England wanted to reduce large-scale aristocratic violence to more manageable proportions, and promoting a cult of single combat achieved exactly that. Secondly, only then did technology allow for the manufacture of light and mobile swords. The ...”

“... Linda Colley’s new book is an attempt to discover and analyse the ingredients of British national identity as it was forged in the 18th century – ‘forged’ in the double sense of made up (for communities are imagined and imaginary things) and fashioned in the fire of battle. It is also an attempt to recover and understand the patriotism of ‘ordinary British people’, a patriotism she refuses to regard simply in terms of ideology, or as the result, for many, of variously mediated and unmediated forms of coercion, or as a primarily irrational response by the British to the experience of finding themselves members of the new nation created by the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 ...”

“... people: these have been the objects of desire for the most influential post-war historians of France. The tactical benefits of this have been enormous. By its very nature, political history can easily seem highly specific, illuminating the past of one state but very little else. But to the extent that we are all blessed or burdened with ...”

“... and violent manifestations. In particular, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France onwards, conservatives employed stories of actual or invented human suffering (Marie Antoinette’s plight, for instance) to undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution might possess. The result, David Bindman writes in his ...”

“... Mao. It has also long been accepted that the revolution was influenced by developments outside France. The central thesis of R.R. Palmer’s Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959-64) was that 1776 and 1789 – along with other late 18th-century upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white ...”

“... that ‘every Briton decided one way or the other’ on the validity of Britain’s war against France and its revolution. It shows that Rowbottom hated the rich and wanted peace, but also that he relished British naval victories and dreaded insurrection at home. Wells’s own examination of those Irish sailors involved in the Spithead and Nore mutinies no ...”

“... desirably, are her books. Now that imperial history is no longer a monotonal tale of Britain or France or Spain or the Dutch against the rest, but rather a complex saga of the collisions, compromises and comings together of many different cultures, how is it to be chronicled so as to fit between the covers of monographs and become accessible to interested ...”

“... sought to operate as a determinedly assimilationist nation state in the way post-Revolutionary France often tried to do. This does not mean the UK can be regarded merely as a multinational state, or (pace some post-colonialist commentators) as an English-constructed empire. Instead, the UK has most closely resembled what the Columbia political scientist ...”

“... begin one year after the outbreak of the French Revolution; they include Britain’s wars with France which lasted, almost without a break, from 1793 to 1815; they end just 12 years before the Great Reform Act. At no other time has Parliament experienced such a concentrated amalgam of trial, triumph and sheer, exhilarating talent. No fewer than 13 prime ...”

“... endlessly about illumination. Jeffrey grew up with a messiah complex, while his mother and sister Linda, about whom we do not hear nearly enough, wrestled with the minor roles for women in P.B.’s spiritual universe. Masson was aware that by the age of four he was ‘being raised as if I were the incarnation of a great Indian yogi’. At 13, he was ...”

“... Crimean War, and to the encouragement of free trade and peaceful co-existence between Britain and France. His private life was as worthy as his politics. He cherished his wife and children, though of necessity he was often absent from them; he attended Anglican church services regularly; and even his quirks and eccentricities were shared by many other ...”

“... of his angry poetry (Rimes et révoltes) and the uncut autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (2001). Linda Asher has now given Déguignet a splendidly faithful English voice: pugnacious, tetchy and opinionated. From the start Déguignet punctures the romantic myth of Brittany, land of dolmens, Arthurian legend and fairies. He regularly went hungry, never had a ...”

“... carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career’. His biography comes hard on the heels of Linda Kelly’s, and it would be comforting to report that O’Toole’s was the rehash, but the Granta puff has it the right way round, while Alan Chedzoy’s life of the first Mrs Sheridan (the noted soprano and beauty Elizabeth Linley) is more boisterously ...”