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“... sacred texts in our rucksacks (The Making of the English Working Class, Work and Revolution in France), convinced that we were acquiring the tools to explain – and, we naturally assumed, alter – relations of power and domination. I’m not sure when we noticed that if social history was a glamorous discipline, it was also a rather masculine one: the ...”

“... into her things when she was out. I asked what colour carpet she’d like; that surprised her. ‘Rose-coloured,’ she said. I wanted to know what we should call her. She said she always addressed her employers as Mr and Mrs So-and-So, but she wanted us to call her Viv. Why didn’t she want parity? She just didn’t, so Viv it was. On her way out, she saw ...”

“... predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of a Jewish businessman who had made his living on the black market during the Occupation and a Flemish actress who worked in the Nazi film industry, could not. He was so consumed by the history of Occupied Paris, the ...”

“... German ex-soldier who feels impelled to revisit the scene of a World War Two massacre in occupied France. Kestner is in his sixties and is dying of lung cancer – cancer which may either be caused by cigarette smoking or (so we are told) by ‘pointless anxiety’, a ‘daily fear of nothing’. Though his daughter has settled in Paris, it is the first time ...”

“... the year 1189. It was paid for, we now know, by William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of slow-grown timber for the reinforcement inside: no ...”

“... ate no less than a thousand meals with journalists, mostly at sober, modest places like L’Ecu de France, where it is hard to eat for two (and partake of the standard rieslings) for less than £100. A passage about Eric Varley, the former Labour Secretary of State for Industry, echoes the contrast in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden ...”

“... translation, which I have never seen, or heard of, though there must be copies hidden away in France. Since then, Oxford has reprinted her novel Mary and her fragmentary novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman in a single volume. Her Collected Letters have also been edited by Ralph Wardle, in 1979; he expressed his view then that she had written ‘two ...”

“... moral weakness of women, have produced the same results, in every age and in every culture.’ In France at that time prostitution was of two main kinds: the ‘controlled’ sort, in which the state regulated the activity and carried out regular medical inspections on working women; and the ‘uncontrolled’, in which – throughout all ranks of society, up ...”

“... himself as an Englishman, and as part of that studied act of identity he used to wear a white rose on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth, in memory of Richard III, whom he regarded as the last English – because Plantagenet – king. Coincidentally, Shapiro quotes from a popular postwar textbook, The Plantagenets, in which John Hooper Harvey ...”

“... in power, however, the Conservatives over-reacted to the immediate difficulties. World oil prices rose again in 1979. To contain inflation, already high and likely to rise further, the Treasury imposed fierce monetary controls. The pound and interest rates rose dramatically. (The control of the money supply from the ...”

“... enough to have the book wrapped in plastic with an advisory notice. It’s not hard to see why. France had been rocked by a series of scandals over child pornography, and Robbe-Grillet’s novel was a work of unrelenting and graphic sadism, in which women – or rather, barely pubescent girls – exist to be raped, tortured and murdered. Some are eaten ...”

“... to finish the season isn’t feasible – or necessary. But how to end the competition fairly? In France, the remaining league games were cancelled, and a points per game system used to determine the final result. This meant that the bottom two clubs, Amiens and Toulouse, were relegated to Ligue 2; both have since launched legal proceedings against the Ligue ...”

“... It began life as a German colony. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, it was partitioned between France and Britain. Britain’s mandate consisted of two thin slivers along the western border with Nigeria, the ‘Northern Cameroons’ and the ‘Southern Cameroons’ – roughly 20 per cent of the territory. In due course the British would administer it from ...”

“... you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose ... (I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands Along with the poem whose opening two lines must have stuck ...”

“... been out of print and in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike). Rose Macaulay, for example, oozed – anonymously – in the TLS: ‘an altogether delightful book … an enchanting cast of characters, all set forth with a kind of gay, insouciant wit … the humour is infectious, the figures endearingly ridiculous and ...”