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“... oil lamps to mark notable public occasions. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 saw a display outside the French ambassador’s residence where the figures of France and England stood united between the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Concord’. Unfortunately, some sailors in the crowd whose spelling was weak felt insulted at the implication they had been conquered and ...”

“... who had run the Old Vic School with Michel Saint-Denis and Glen Byam Shaw. They trained actors on French and Russian models, serious above all about taking the theatre seriously. For a while it looked as though they would be chosen to run the National Theatre when the time came. The capricious Tyrone Guthrie fired them: Glen Byam Shaw went to Stratford and ...”

“... citing a characteristic declaration that ‘a bill becomes a law because certain words of Norman French are pronounced in specific circumstances: the same words in other circumstances and synonymous words in the same circumstances would not make law.’ What is being invoked – celebrated – here is a view of allegiance and identity and governance that, as ...”

“... his contemporaries, however, his great revelations came in the cinema. He was enchanted by Leslie Howard in Korda’s Scarlet Pimpernel and even more by Vivien Leigh in The Hamilton Woman, which begins with the elderly, raddled Emma looking into the camera as the picture dissolves and we see her young again ‘in all her beauty, running through the splendours ...”

“... heavily populated by PhD candidates: in The Namesake it’s clear that Gogol’s wife, Moushumi (French literature, NYU), is going to have an affair with Dimitri (German literature, Heidelberg) from the moment she sees him ‘striding across campus, alone, holding a copy of The Man without Qualities’. But Lahiri’s feel for the surfaces of comfortable ...”

“... 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688’. There were also plenty of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by ...”

“... to be mightily and diligently looked into and cared for.’ On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means sure that the danger ...”

“... Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but largely consist of forgotten country-house comedies, French classics, light farces, anodyne musical comedies and the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan (though, unlike today, there were no musical revivals, popstar tributes or shows based on films). In an era when the point of plays was to provide vehicles ...”

“... Fall’, evokes a dialogue with historiography which has become ever more explicit. The great French historian, Fernand Braudel, cited Dur-rell in the provocative conclusion to his study of the Mediterranean world, illustrating his concept of the longue durée with Durrell’s claim that the Greek fisherman of today enables us to understand Odysseus. The ...”

“... But MEK members outside Iraq also displayed remarkable devotion to the cause. When in 2003 the French authorities detained Maryam Rajavi on terrorism charges (she was later released) ten MEK members around the world set themselves on fire in protest; two of them died. The MEK of course denies being a cult, though many outsiders – senior US military ...”

“... emerged after the war as the most militant European intellectual to denounce Soviet Communism (French admirers credited his masterpiece, the novel Darkness at Noon, with preventing a Communist victory in the 1946 referendum on a new constitution), and his writings – journalism, novels, manifestos and memoirs – made him world famous. In a fourth ...”

“... read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I ...”

“... money by acting. But he also persuaded the independent producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to Howard Fast’s novel Citizen Tom Paine for him to direct and, as the FBI noted (they had a dossier on Welles), planned a series of educational short films on ‘minority problems’. The Stranger (1946) – a frankly commercial production which Welles made for ...”

“... attract or offend which particular audience. And ultimately there was no choice. An original like Howard Hawks could defy the odds with Scarface and His Girl Friday, but a personal ‘signature’, too, becomes a formula in the end, and Red River gives way to Rio Bravo and Rio Lobo. To step seriously out of the groove of the big studios condemned a director ...”

“... were also repudiating ‘unaesthetic and superficial realism’ in American literature. It was French condescension that celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she ...”