“... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...”

“... exile was a traumatic experience, whose grip on his personality would tighten over the years. As David Kertzer shows in this subtle and brilliantly told account, the exile of Pius IX was an event that shaped modern Europe. The revolution that broke out in Rome in the spring of 1848 had begun not with protests, but with jubilation. Little was known of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... TV channel Russia Today solicited the views of Annie Machon – ex-MI5 agent, ex-partner of David Shayler and current 9/11-truther – and she came up with a conspiracy theory of her very own: ‘Hardline factions within the American administration,’ she surmised, ‘egged on the FBI to try and get them to come up with this result because of the need ...”

“... and classical myth were discarded as subject matter. The English had a lot to answer for. In France, where the state bought large paintings for the Luxembourg, and for provincial museums and churches, it had always been reasonable to paint big pictures. In England – but more and more in France too – size and ...”

“... judgment on 3 February this year on the 8 o’clock evening news on TF1, a private TV channel. France 2, a state-owned channel, broadcasts its news at the same time, and gambled on Juppé’s resigning. When he announced instead his intention to appeal the decision and meanwhile continue serving both as a parliamentary deputy and as mayor of ...”

“... 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 ...”