“... be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to Ireland was subject to depression and illness). Until recently, most great playwrights of Irish origin have wished to write neither in nor about the land of their birth. There are two exceptions. Although he ...”

“... by the American Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote an early ...”

“... North Africa and Italy. Defeat came when there was nowhere left to retreat to. The retreat through France after the Allied break-out following the Normandy invasion threatened to break that pattern. In Rückzug, Joachim Ludewig, an official in the German defence ministry, who first published this newly translated study more than twenty years ago, describes the ...”

“... Capetian kings controlled would eventually expand far beyond the family territory of the Île-de-France, to embrace the principalities and smaller counties that would eventually become France. The publisher’s blurb for House of Lilies claims that the Capetians – Charles IV, who died in 1328, was the last king in the ...”

“... David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal portrait is so convincing that it is hard to see an official biography adding more than superfluous detail. He brings us close to the living temper of a poet who is still fairly unknown to English-speakers but who, through his impact on T ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... had read at least one of the Astérix books; and by the time of Goscinny’s death total sales in France are said to have amounted to more than 55 million copies, putting Astérix substantially ahead of his main (Belgian) rival, Tintin. The first French space satellite, launched in 1965, was named in his honour (the US later matched this with spaceships ...”

“... terms, little less than there was thirty years ago. The essays on the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy and West Germany permit the conclusion that in all these countries the top 10 per cent earn about 30 per cent of all income earned, whereas the bottom 30 per cent earn a mere 10 per cent. What changes there have been have affected, above ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... from the political arena, even as some of them endorsed elements of his programme. Like Le Pen in France, he makes a virtue of this excommunication, turning it into one more ‘proof’ of the hypocrisy and corruption of the establishment. In a recent book, he argues that the way the Israeli establishment has hounded him proves that Israel is not a ...”

“... his time between Clarence House, a country home at Bagshot Park, and a villa in the South of France. A variety of fashionable ladies brightened his old age, among them Leonie Leslie and Gladys Deacon. He kept in touch with visiting Canadians and with the British Army. He lived to witness the death of George V, the abdication of Edward VIII and the ...”

“... his account of the Sevillians’ takeover of the Party. After demolishing the Llopis Old Guard in France, they set upon their fellow renovators inside Spain, savaging the Madrid Socialists and forcing the more cautious Basques to accept Andalusian primacy. In an aggressive and slanderous campaign, they hounded the Madrid leader, Pablo Castellano, scorning him ...”

“... hostile to Spain would be attributed to the fact that its author (Churchill, Roosevelt, Mendés-France, Trygve Lie etc) was a Freemason. Franco’s contradictions occasionally bewilder Professor Fusi, who finds it incredible that a man who was a good soldier and a prudent politician should have believed such rubbish. Generally, however, the author manages ...”

“... Kutusov’s death, and Barclay would continue to give good service in the campaigns of Germany and France – but never in the supreme command. That dubious distinction was awarded the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg. This was probably just as well. The author wisely does not attempt to make far-reaching claims for his subject’s standing as a battle ...”

“... By now she was in regular communication with an angel, and, known as Jeanne des Anges, she toured France, showing her hand to vast crowds, and to the King, the Queen and Cardinal Richelieu. In 1645, a visitor to Loudun, Balthasar de Monconys, went to see the prioress and her sacred hand. Only he did not simply observe; he reached out his hand to hers: ‘With ...”