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“... never be comprehended by a single person.’ They also typify the difference between English and French intellectual approaches. The very title of Robb’s Parisians announces that it is going to be based on people rather than thesis or theory; while its craftily alluring subtitle ‘An Adventure History of Paris’ seems to hint at Jules Verne (not that he ...”

“... of the two political camps of right and left’. This positioning caught the imagination of French voters disillusioned with Les Républicains, whose leader, François Fillon, had been disgraced in a nepotism scandal, and with the Parti Socialiste (PS), undermined by François Hollande’s disappointing presidency. Macron had been an investment banker ...”

“... and Thirties, he is right, in that this bonanza inspired a host of emulators. Pirate tales and French Revolution escapades proliferated. But surely there were plenty of able practitioners whose careers overlapped the early years of Sabatini’s, notably Weyman, Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The ...”

“... for her favourite performer, Charles Hawtrey. She had acquired the English rights in a successful French comedy which satirised the pose of decadence in Fin-de-Siècle society and centred on a ludicrously morbid suicide-pact. Her adaptation was full of paradoxical epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde, with five acts, a Duke and a Duchess among the leading ...”

“... refused to advertise on Dallas where 30-second slots can cost up to $500,000. Jack Lang, the French minister for the arts, attacked the series as ‘a symbol of American cultural imperialism’. In December 1982, the West German Government took the unprecedented step of issuing a communiqué to the effect that Dallas did not pose a fundamental threat to ...”

“... conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and T.H. Long were earlier on the Random House Dictionary. All very cosy. But while it desirably makes for shared knowledge and a solid ...”

“... history. Marie Seurat’s memoir of the Middle East reads, inappropriately, like a dandified French novel, from the days of Cocteau and Gide, wilful and impressionistic. She is not a professional writer and acknowledges: ‘Paul-Jean Franceschini helped me give my story a shape.’ She was born to a wealthy Syriac Christian family in Aleppo, Syria, and ...”

“... venture in Palestine, and detained for more than three years in a series of British and French concentration camps on (undeclared) suspicion of being an Axis spy. In both families a tense silence surrounded these episodes. Sensing that his grandfathers must have done something wrong, O’Neill set out to learn what had happened to them; in the ...”

“... other side of the coin. Like so many of the letters in this second volume, this was written in French. It was an excellent decision on the part of the editors to give us throughout both original and translation. Here the French reads: si, tout en étant primé, il pouvait sans goujaterie rester dans son coin, il ne ...”

“... which could be the outward signs of a nocturnal scouse cult; and on the Isle of Wight, where the French Benedictine Dom Paul Bellot designed Quarr Abbey, rising above the Solent like a displaced Malian mosque; and at Battersea: Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense power station, fought over for decades, not least by Stamp, was one of the great tokens of its ...”

“... socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did practically nothing’. But on such days he must have been working at ...”

“... the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to ...”

“... as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way ...”

“... assassination in 1584. Walsingham’s convictions made the prospect of Elizabeth’s marriage to a French Catholic as odious to him as the yoking of Christ with Belial. Nevertheless, his distaste for the proposed matches with the dukes of Anjou and Alençon that dominated Anglo-French relations in the 1560s and 1570s was ...”

“... straight line and the monumental vista (the straight line, Carmona maintains, was quintessentially French, while omitting to mention that this was so largely from the point of view of the ruling classes: Victor Hugo, in his ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs’, attacked the obsession with the straight line by linking it directly to the oppressive exercise of state ...”