“... alternative for Algeria other than independence. Several ministers, such as Jacques Soustelle and Bernard Cornut-Gentille, were in favour of the integration of France and Algeria. Most important of all, the Prime Minister, Michel Debré, and his entourage, were prodigal with their assurances that the President would never even contemplate abandoning ...”

“... later life – her flirtation with exile in Europe, and in particular her literary life in the Paris of the nouveau roman (which she thought a fraudulent notion) – also has suggestive parallels with Wharton’s Left Bank sojourn in the ‘same’ Paris as Gertrude Stein and all those other Modernists she avoided like ...”

“... academics, who preferred a Chair of Medicine, the impact in Scotland of Peter Ramus’s Paris-based assault on Rhetoric helped prise open a chink through which literary criticism could eventually squeeze. Bernard Lamy’s L’Art de parler(1675, translated 1676) signals an important transitional stage in the ...”

“... usually shared by the more cynical and abrupt French – ‘un emmerdeur de moins,’ replied a Paris lycée teacher when her pupils asked her what she thought about the death of Bernard Shaw. But it was the French who, on this occasion, showed the greater sentimentality. The news of Sartre’s death was greeted with ...”

“... a trial to make sure of eliminating her morally as well as physically. After the failure to take Paris by storm in 1429 her star declined as rapidly as it had risen. It may be permissible to conclude that Paris was not over-desirous of being stormed, or liberated, or that there was no strong general feeling in favour of ...”

“... his family, who weren’t interested in his becoming an artist. He arrived in England in 1905 from Paris, where he had studied carving and modelling and met Degas and Rodin. He had also been singled out by the woman who was to become his first wife: Margaret Dunlop, a Scot, ten years his senior and married. She divorced and became Mrs Epstein in 1906, which ...”

“... into colour more by internal forces, whereas Van Gogh was prompted into it externally – first in Paris by the Impressionists, and then by the light of the South). Yet there are always continuities in even the most style-changing of artists. Van Gogh’s subject matter, after all, remained much the same: the soil, and those who tend it; the poor, and their ...”

“... Jacques placed himself and his car, a Pic-Pic 16 HP, at the service of military doctors in the Paris hospitals. And as he recorded in one of his multi-volume photo diaries: ‘1915 Année de Guerre: Peu de Photos’. Afterwards, the Belle Époque continued for Lartigue, but with shorter hair, shorter skirts, more beach nudity and some female liberation: he ...”

“... his tenure as the Collège de France’s first professor of Arabic comfortably incarcerated in a Paris asylum. Two hundred years later, it was not much easier to learn Arabic in France. The leading Arabist in post-Revolutionary Paris, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, held colloquial Arabic in such disdain that he never ...”

“... are basically the sexual biographies of Tomás, Tereza and Sabina, of Paul and Agnes and Laura and Bernard and Rubens – whose sex life (Kundera does love his taxonomies) goes through five phases, from ‘the period of athletic muteness’ to something called (coyness is also of the process) ‘the mystical period’. Slowness runs a typically ferocious ...”

“... officer, and spent several unhappy years in the Dutch East Indies, before relocating in 1904 to Paris and reinventing herself as the Oriental dancer whose name in Malay means ‘Eye of the Dawn’. She dyed her skin, decked herself out in veils and a spangled headdress, and, dancing a ‘Javanese temple ritual’, presented herself as a lost princess and ...”

“... and illusions were quickly shattered. In the event, Ireland’s first representatives in Paris were Sean T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy. O’Kelly, who had been a member of Dublin Corporation for many years, represented the Dáil Government in Paris from 1919 until his dismissal in 1922, but also spent a brief ...”

“... in El Biar, just outside Algiers, Jackie Derrida – he didn’t become Jacques until he moved to Paris – often had the feeling that French was not his language: ‘I speak only one language,’ as he put it, ‘and it is not my own.’ Integration into the Republic had liberated Jews from their inferior status as natives, but they still faced severe ...”

“... mangling a Punch doll in her chubby embrace. In pursuit of commissions, he moved the family to Paris in 1829, where they eked out a parlous existence, frequently changing address (‘In my early years,’ Bonheur recalled, ‘we used to migrate with the birds’). She pined for the farmyard animals she had known in Bordeaux, but found some solace in Sunday ...”

“... the bargain reached at Maastricht was of essentially French and German design. The central aim for Paris was a financial edifice capable of replacing the unilateral power of the Bundesbank as the de facto regulator of the fortunes of its neighbours, with a de jure central authority over the European monetary space in which German interests would no longer be ...”