“... foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who said that he spoke on behalf of ‘an old country, France, that does not forget . . . all it owes to the freedom fighters that came from the United States of America and everywhere’. Jack Straw took up the theme, declaring: ‘Britain is also a very old country. It was founded in 1066 – by the ...”

“... Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist ...”

“... was the Danube. In 1841, the London Convention – concluded between Russia, Great Britain, France, Austria and Prussia – closed the straits to all warships except those of Turkey’s allies in wartime. The Russians intended this as a concession to the Royal Navy, but they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that ...”

“... already out of date in the 1860s when they were built to defend the dockyard against attack from France; the chemical explosives factory established at Cliffe by Curtis’s and Harvey Ltd in 1898; the Anglo-Persian (then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum) Oil Company’s refinery on the Isle of Grain, operative until the early 1980s. The camera zooms ...”

“... Magdalen and the Financial Times, so his uncle took a new young wife. On one visit to the South of France, Michael met an unfamiliar young woman wearing a sun tan and one of Alex’s cream silk shirts. She was Alexa Boycun, a Canadian. Later on, Michael guessed that she had come into his uncle’s view as a sultry model in some pin-up pictures taken by one of ...”

“... be deduced from the exclamations he made on 16 July 1940 concerning the ‘destruction’ of France. ‘Egoism, greed, possessiveness are the poisons which corroded France, and have ended by ruining her. They are the poisons which make the whole Proustian world so futile and so sterile. A grain of charity would have ...”

“... who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights. The law was controversial not only for its seeming admission of national ‘guilt’, as some critics put it, but also because it appeared to prescribe a ...”

“... year, when the commission appointed by Jacques Chirac to look into the health of secular values in France delivered its recommendations, no one was surprised to hear that a ban on the wearing of all ostentatious religious symbols in schools, the Muslim hijab or veil above all, was high on the list. The deliberations were really about Islam and its inroads into ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and unexamined ...”

“... to the distant time when I read a book a day. They begin with Lloyd George and the Generals by David Woodward,* a professor at Marshall University, which is somewhere in the New World. The difficult relations between Lloyd George, when prime minister, and the British generals from Haig onwards during the First World War have been a topic of long ...”

“... change, until the French Revolution threw the rulers into panic. Their decision to go to war with France in 1793, in alliance with the Continental despots, must have been in good part an escape from reforms that might now lead perilously far. Allowance must be made for an even more discreditable motive. Blackburn cites Wilberforce’s later belief that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that he stood on top of the Vendôme Column in place of his uncle’s statue, he was struck, as David Baguley points out in Napoleon III and His Regime, not by the glory but by the loneliness. In Ham, he wrote a pamphlet on ‘L’Extinction du paupérisme’, explaining, in effect, how much better everything would be if he could just be allowed to get on ...”

“... he continues to direct at English blindspots – modernist architecture, provincial glamour, France – in his excellent television programmes. But thanks to some of the cooks cited in his bibliography – Simon Hopkinson, say, whose Roast Chicken and Other Stories (Ebury, £16.99) is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus ...”

“... and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and ...”