“... new offices. This ramshackle edifice came close to collapse in 1709, when the crown banker Samuel Bernard found himself seriously embarrassed for cash. By the end of the war the crown owed 900 million livres in promissory notes. The death of Louis XIV brought a fresh crisis. Noailles toyed with, but in the end dismissed, the idea of summoning the Estates ...”

“... wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to Livingston’s book, saying that if only he had been able to read it before starting his own book, he’d have gone about it differently.) What Livingston calls the ...”

“... there were some uncommonly righteous lasses too. Together they had seen the vision splendid. Let Bernard Shaw, running on rich mixture, explain: Joyousness, a sacred gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity, rises like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust and mud of the slums; rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs rise ...”

“... the terrorist threat or unwilling to follow France into its former colonies.In search of support, Paris urged its partners in the region to build a ‘security and development alliance’. The G5-Sahel staged its first military joint operation – 750 West African soldiers assisted by 180 French military – in 2017. A year later they were unable to defend ...”

“... out and made his way quickly to the railway station. Gide, who was 25, had met Wilde before in Paris and Florence. He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of what he said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The first account, written the following day, was to his mother. He explained to her that he had, after much consideration, decided to ...”

“... but fails to say convincingly what it was, on the inside as it were, that drove Debray from Paris to Havana to become the man that Fidel and his associates referred to as ‘Danton’; the trusted emissary sent to link up with Che in 1967 during his disastrous escapade in Bolivia; the jailbird who sat out his late twenties in a tattered shirt with a ...”

“... of all – to make of Freud? As a young man studying the aetiology of hysteria with Charcot in Paris in 1885, he saw Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou’s Théodora and gushed about it to his long-suffering fiancée, Martha Bernays: How that Sarah plays! After the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could ...”

“... in the 71st artillery regiment in Fontainebleau, arrived in London. Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew from Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for the Resistance under cover of his work in ...”

“... to doff his hat for an empress; and above all a series of fictional characters in contemporary Paris, Agnes and Paul, Agnes’s sister Laura and her lover Bernard, a fashionable and insecure radio interviewer, Agnes’s lover Rubens, whose nickname mocks his abandoned artistic ambitions. The central and most interesting ...”

“... out. Hearing that the young James Joyce is about to soar on his Icarus-like wings from Dublin to Paris, Yeats writes him a kindly note on the advice of Lady Gregory, treats him to breakfast during his London stopover and offers to march him around the odd literary editor. It is a characteristically courteous gesture on Yeats’s part, and an unwittingly ...”

“... a number of abstract painters and sculptors, widened to include younger artists and writers. John Bernard Myers, director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, began to refer to a ‘New York School of Poets’ (which happened to be those whose work his gallery had published). As the 1950s progressed, Hartigan’s coterie became well known and visible. In 1954, for ...”

“... race is restaged. Suffragettes and striking servants vie for Saki’s scorn with the teachings of Bernard Shaw. Here is a sketch of a rich grande dame of a type not, perhaps, wholly extinct: Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage ... When she inveighed eloquently against the evils of capitalism at ...”

“... safe bet, particularly when France unexpectedly recognised the Transitional National Council after Bernard-Henri Lévy persuaded Sarkozy to act quickly. Only a few years before, Sarkozy had given Gaddafi a warm welcome in Paris and, when criticised for it, pointed in his defence to Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear ...”

“... it was too elusive, too much of a mess, yielding little but fruitless speculation. But in 1988, Bernard Baars put forward his ‘global workspace’ theory, that a system in the brain functions to integrate diverse sources of information for use in a slow, attentive style of thinking. We are conscious of whatever is currently in that workspace. In ...”

“... who wouldn’t? More often, however, because she could not think consecutively, as George Bernard Shaw maintained, for more than 60 seconds at a time, she was the interrupter not the interrupted; she once congratulated herself to her dinner guests: ‘I got in a wonderful interruption tonight.’ Nancy Astor was a bundle of contradictions as well as ...”