“... to a palace like Blenheim, had been a conspectus of English life since the Middle Ages. Unlike the French, English landowners mostly liked to be in the country. As employers, farmers, improvers and on occasion wreckers, they were familiar presences on their estates. In the 18th century the country house, often with a landscaped garden, reached its ...”

“... such as it was, was inherited and discreet. Mayerne’s family origins were Piedmontese and French, though he was born in the Protestant oasis of Geneva in the aftermath of the anti-Huguenot pogroms of 1572. He was educated at universities in Germany and France, and his first and second wives were both Dutch. His long career as a court doctor was spent ...”

“... at Vichy is a real-time, one-act play about a group of arrested Jews in the waiting-room of a French police station in 1942. It has been criticised for both the speechifying and the over-neat plotting of its closing section (an aristocratic gentile arrested by mistake hands on his pass to one of the other prisoners, who escapes). Critics have tended to ...”

“... far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and intelligence system. The detonation of British and French nuclear weapons on Pacific atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as ...”

“... was the backdrop to Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, which appeared in French in 1951 and can be said to have created today’s Western image of the shaman. According to Eliade, shamans were neither tricksters nor schizophrenics but practitioners of the original, ‘archaic’ religion of prehistory, survivals from an era when ...”

“... II not died without producing an heir, ‘Scotland,’ Mackay concedes, ‘might have become a French appanage.’ Despite all this In My End Is My Beginning prefers to suggest that a misunderstood proto-liberalism was more responsible for the Queen’s problems at home than her devout Francophilia, her unswerving Catholicism and her disastrous marital ...”

“... in that sense. The Scandinavians and the Dutch have more in common with us than they have with the French and the Italians. The Germans have more in common with us than they do with the Italians. The Italians have more in common with the French than with the Scandinavians, and so on. But all of us have some things in ...”

“... family is much older: a manuscript dated to the 1440s records it as a local tradition. In 1533 a French poet called Maurice Scève, a disciple of Petrarch, announced that he had discovered Laura’s tomb in Avignon. It was unmarked but allegedly contained a casket in which were found a handwritten sonnet in the style of Petrarch (albeit on an off-day) and a ...”

“... the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The children were taught the sins of ...”

“... the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no settler planned to inhabit. The strength and ...”

“... Fry, who, with Clive Bell, ‘made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde’: for them ‘any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid’ was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another essay, Hughes dwells on Howard Hodgkin’s distinguished family ...”

“... seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn them upside down. To Have ...”

“... criminal compact. The Boy Who Followed Ripley is less a brother than a son, something Ripley’s French wife, the svelte Heloise, will never provide, generous as she is with the francs. It is the 1970s; Ripley gardens, exterminates termites in his antique furniture and is learning to play the harpsichord quite well. Ripley’s idyllic life at Villeperce is ...”

“... Alys that the family had been arguing about the desirability of burial in the mausoleum at Castle Howard, when Lady Stanley announced: ‘Only a part of me’s going to be buried: my brain is to be left to the College of Surgeons: you know they only have brains of paupers and criminals as a rule, and they have never had the brain of a clever woman.’ Unlike ...”

“... Portrait Gallery has a fine snapshot (taken by Colin Matthew) of the architectural historian Howard Colvin in the ruins of Godstow Abbey: spectacles pushed up on his forehead, camera dangling from one hand, he looks down intently as he makes a neat entry in the notebook he has just fished from his pocket. I have always been impressed by those academics ...”