“... of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared in 1886, the year of Vyvyan’s birth. These were the years, as Karl Miller wrote in Doubles, when ‘a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature, declared itself.’ Thus Dr Jekyll could announce with full conviction: ‘This, too, was myself’ as he became ‘a stranger in my own ...”

“... Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, link arms with them as they pass through its euphoria, confusion and violence, and track their steps as they re-emerge into the post-revolutionary world.It’s an approach that might ...”

“... Shampoo, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Carrie, The Fury, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies ...”

“... that colonised the European unconscious, giving birth to those whom Godard called the children of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola. The ‘psychological warfare’ reached deep into the mentalities, everyday behaviour and expectations of several generations on both sides of the Atlantic. To what extent is the persistent American need to project Feindbilder a residual ...”

“... States. He liked to boast that thanks to their combined efforts the Germans had dethroned the French Fauvists in the international market.The impact of these efforts to canonise Nolde has been long-lasting. As recently as last year the Scottish National Gallery organised an exhibition of Nolde’s work under the title Colour Is Life.* ‘Nolde felt ...”

“... Nineteenth-century​ French art, and French artists, were fortunate to have the backing of some of the best writers of the day. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Goncourt, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans and Mallarmé all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion ...”

“... orders of Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader; only one portal – from which the communist Karl Liebknecht had declared the German Republic in 1918 – was saved and incorporated into the Politbüro building. The site was left empty until the 1970s, when the GDR erected a ‘Palace of the Republic’ – a large modernist box with gold windows which ...”

“... without at the same time feeling obliged to deliver embarrassing lectures to the Germans and the French – of all people – about how their economies could become as productive as the British. Whatever Mr Blair might think about the leaders of Old Labour, at least they had no such illusions about the capacities of the average British businessman. To make ...”

“... is a line of work. That would appear to be the operating assumption, however, of the celebrated French sociologist-philosopher Jean Baudrillard in America, the latest of his works translated into English. At first the reader might wonder why a prose as dense as his should be made more so by having it stretched across pages of a width and gloss more ...”

“... feeding delegations passed scraps of spiteful arithmetic to the reporters’ tables nearby: the French are at 3.6, the Germans at 3.5, let’s keep ’em both out, ha-ha! A continent has been bound into the straitjacket of a set of percentages that have gained ever greater precision and authority as next year’s deadline for selection approaches; and ...”

“... warrior but the populist rebel Jack Cade, who has Lord Saye beheaded because ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor.’ The xenophobic rhetoric favoured by Cade is assigned to another repulsive character in the last of this sequence of histories, Richard III (1593), when before his defeat at Bosworth the tyrant assures his troops that the ...”

“... in general showed little interest in the discoveries. The contempt for history of the French intellectuals of the time is often exaggerated; we cannot reproach Voltaire or Montesquieu with being unhistorical. But though they had regard for ‘antiquity’, they had none for ‘antiquities’, which they despised. Montesquieu remarked that all ...”

“... To anyone who supposes that Britain is uniquely inhospitable to its intellectuals, while the French give them their proper due, Collini has a story to tell: the grass is not greener across the Channel and it is not so bad here after all. The myth of British exceptionalism is a key component of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it ...”

“... meeting it was decided to co-opt Heisenberg, who later reached an understanding with his colleague Karl Friedrich von Weiszäcker to build an atomic pile (they called it a uranium machine) as a post-war power source and as a way of protecting young German physicists from the call-up. However, in May 1940 Weiszäcker realised that the plutonium generated in ...”

“... to Christ. Not everyone hits quite that note: among sentimental treatments of the case, a short French account of Trois Procès Scandaleux lowers the tone a bit by setting the case alongside the trial of Marie Antoinette. Nor is it quite true that everyone who has written about the trial has taken Socrates’s side, certainly not in the sense of returning a ...”