“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... twenties and snappily dressed, are the noble Jean de Dinteville, ambassador from King Francis I of France to Henry VIII, and his friend, perhaps alter ego, Georges de Selve, who had been given the small see of Lavaur near Toulouse to provide for a career in the royal service. Dinteville was in England from February to November 1533; de Selve, whose mission, if ...”

“... with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in France when it was translated soon after the war as Le Zéro et l’Infini, and that it was dramatised in 1951 by an American called Sidney Kingsley, with whom Koestler quarrelled, to the point of bringing a lawsuit which Kingsley regrettably won. He does not ...”

“... In the extracts from David Stockman’s memoirs published on Monday 14 April by Newsweek, Reagan’s former Budget Director spoke of the mediocrities, charlatans and power-hungry politicos who cluster around the disturbingly vague and incompetent Great Communicator. For them, Stockman said, ‘reality-time’ was the seven o’clock evening news on television ...”

“... who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks that ‘it is a deformity in some “radicals”’ – he has Marx particularly in mind – ‘to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a ...”

“... brought him, on recovery, appointment as a brigade major at home, and when the brigade moved to France, his efficiency won him promotion from that plum staff job to a succession of others. In 1918, he was chief of staff of a division and in 1919 a battalion commander and lieutenant-colonel. Good luck also then saw to it that he went straight to the Staff ...”

“... of denying Windsor’s wife the title of Her Royal Highness. The military job given to the Duke in France during the period of the ‘phoney war’ was a mean attempt to ensure that his talents were not used appropriately, while the Governorship of the Bahamas was a ‘bizarre’ appointment, the ‘pettiest and most difficult’ in the British Empire. Even ...”

“... the United States, were divided up between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new ...”

“... in triumph to Paris, where he pursued a prolific literary career. Le Pouvoir Intellectuel en France was published two years ago and now reaches us as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France. The French title, with its Gallic abstraction, grandiose and menacing at once, promises much; the ...”