“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the anti-totalitarian front fell apart. The first skirmish occurred in the early 1980s, when Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that there was a generic French ideology, stretching from left to right across the 20th century, saturating the nation with anti-semitism and cryptofascism. This was too much for Le Débat, which demolished Lévy’s blunders and ...”

“... the evidence. On 13 November 2015, when terrorists massacred ninety people at the Bataclan in Paris, Captagon was immediately suspected. To Professor Jean-Pol Tassin, an addiction specialist at Inserm, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, the killers’ ‘empty expressions, their determination, their mechanical movements’ all ...”

“... were hopeful guesswork. Finally, they were never quite sure what their masters in London and Paris wanted from them. The politicians were desperately anxious not to be seen to be involved, and they also suspected that the Bolsheviks had broken their codes. Direct communication with their men ‘in the field’ amounted to mutters out of the corner of the ...”

“... According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy considered making Walter Lippmann his ambassador to Paris, but Schlesinger told the president he was more useful in the papers. When Lippmann visited the Oval Office on 8 November 1962, Ronald Steel tells us in Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980), Kennedy tried hard to make him feel important. He ...”

“... who did the same thing when he was supposedly under the moral protection of his grandfather in Paris twenty years later. No strait laces about the Franklins, though the biographers seem a little reluctant to point out the coincidence. Franklin himself admitted in his Autobiography that the ‘hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently ...”

“... recognises certain sharers of her aims: among literary critics, Wayne Booth; among philosophers, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell; among social scientists, Amartya Sen. Nussbaum explains her discovery of virtues eloquently, volubly, in the manner of a belated Victorian moralist. The reverse of a dry writer, she is fairly often deeply moved, and you come ...”

“... He is not a son of . . . He didn’t go to Sciences Po or a business school,’ the manager of a Paris cinema told me. ‘He’s not a technocrat. His schooling was the cinema.’ In Sélection officielle, Frémaux remembers suiting up (as is obligatory) as a young man to sit in the worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film ...”

“... or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative years, according to this biography, were haunted by ‘the dark counterpoint of constant, brooding ...”

“... Scott Lucas is right to stress that before Suez there was Buraimi. During a Nato meeting in Paris in December 1956, Dulles, who had just emerged from his bout with cancer, engaged Dr Luns, the Dutch Foreign Minister, in an argument about ‘colonial’ issues, referring heatedly to ‘your aggression’ in Saudi Arabia. When Luns asked him what he was ...”

“... the safety and therapeutic efficacy of medical procedures are carried out either on the poor, as Bernard Shaw implied in the uproariously funny preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, or upon prisoners, for as Voltaire records in his letters from England, the efficacy and safety of variolation against smallpox was carried out with the enthusiastic connivance of ...”

“... city anywhere in Europe: Hippolyte Taine pointed out that London was more than twice the size of Paris and equal to ten Lyons or 12 Marseilles. (Glasgow, it should be said, was even more dominant in Scotland than London was in England.) Professional soccer required not just a few large towns, but leagues able to draw regular large crowds in 20, 40 ...”

“... ambitions. She was named ‘class actress’ in a high school that produced Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Zero Mostel and Walter Matthau. But she was lopsided from scoliosis, and when she graduated during the Depression, considered herself fortunate to get work at the National New York Packing and Shipping Company. Men handled the boxes, while ...”