“... 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 ...”

“... to for inspiration. In the 1910s and early 1920s, a work-study programme took young Chinese to France, where they found jobs in factories and went to evening classes. Underfed and underwhelmed by the realities of European democracy, some joined communist groups. The young Chinese radicals struggling to get by in ...”

“... from the sloth and decadence of the Thirties by the catastrophes of Dunkirk and the fall of France. A welling-up of patriotism united all classes in a determination to fight on. By standing alone against Hitler in the summer of 1940, the British ensured that ultimately the war would be won and the evils of Nazism destroyed for ever. Now for the Ponting ...”

“... interest of the love affair. Marguerite Duras was born in Indo-China in 1914 (returning to France when she was 17), so she is of an age with the heroine of The Lover, a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 1930. Perhaps it is the pictorial value of The Lover that attracts so strongly, for this novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. We begin with the old lady ...”

“... of ‘the difficulty of maintaining social distinctions in an impatiently equalising world’. In France and its empire, the logic led to granting full civil rights to religious minorities (first Protestants, then Jews), and then, if only temporarily, to black slaves. It did not do similar things for women but Hunt implicitly takes a stand against those ...”

“... Armoured Division and Patton’s Third Army to break out towards Brittany and the whole of central France including Paris. In fact, the situation had been plain long before then. Just ten days after D-Day, Hitler summoned Rommel and his superior, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, to Margival, near Soissons, the specially constructed base from which the Führer had ...”

“... Baron d’Holbach, Volney, Diderot and the other great Enlighteners of pre-Revolutionary France. Human beings, it asserts, are above all perfectible. They need look nowhere else for improvement but to themselves. Women are equal to men. Religion is superstition, marriage an ‘odious monopoly’, riches and poverty unnecessary evils. People can and ...”

“... opens with the amputation of the hero’s finger. A historical novel set in pre-Revolutionary France, it shares with Lawrence Norfolk’s recent Lemprière’s Dictionary the knowledge of some hitherto unsuspected developments in 18th-century robotics. In Paul Micou’s Rotten Times the main character suffers from a hyperactive access of memory, known as ...”

“... that was able to shift from autocracy to democratic governance. Arid, landlocked, larger than France (its former colonial master) and Spain combined, and among the world’s poorest nations, dependent on foreign aid, Mali shook off single-party rule in 1991, when massive protests touched off a coup that ended the 23-year reign of General Moussa ...”

“... include Layla Ba‘albaki, Hannan al-Shaykh, Ahdaf Soueif, Tayyeb Salih and Zakariyya Tamir. But France is even more popular with Arab writers and there are quite a few to be found in Germany and Scandinavia. Soon after the Six-Day War, the Israeli politician Yigal Allon told Emile Habiby, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, that the Palestinian people did ...”

“... participants displayed, especially in the course of this year. The faster and more steeply prices rose, the more investors had to lose, and consequently, the jumpier they became. Despite the warning signs, investors, analysts and brokers have all been caught off guard. No one seemed to think that a reversal could be so sudden, or that prices in New ...”