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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the nuclear danger was real. (The other half was the fact that Iran was ‘the world’s leading sponsor of terror’ – a misleading Israeli contribution to American political discourse.) To be told by the CIA et al ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... centre of the world. Why shouldn’t Havana invoke Washington as Washington invokes Rome? As in France after the Revolution, the identification of the US with ancient Rome was avowedly republican, but it also had to do with empire. France’s empire soon came and went, but America’s has only grown over the years, and ...”

“... in the aftermath of François Hollande’s botched presidency.As well as being remembered in France as the great orator of the left, Jaurès is still seen across the political spectrum as a champion of ‘republican values’. In 2014, on the centenary of his assassination on the eve of the First World War, he was honoured by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ...”