“... 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 ...”

“... 27 years. This means that many departments have suffered a sharp drop in their number of seats – Paris has gone from 31 to 21 seats and the in-fighting in the capital is the fiercest of all, especially since Le Pen is standing here and is bound to be elected with at least one other FN candidate. The party bosses have priorities of their own. Thinking ahead ...”

“... Lanzmann and his new wife reassembled the family in Brioude, in the Auvergne. Paulette moved to Paris, married a Serbian-Jewish surrealist poet called Monny de Boully, and barely saw her children for several years. The Vichy government wasted little time in passing anti-semitic laws after the fall of France in June 1940. Secular, assimilated Jews of Eastern ...”

“... then and later (Lincoln Steffens, the Webbs, H.G. Wells, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, Bernard Shaw), but it was Ransome who first coined those glowing phrases that lingered in the Western mind for so long. He was thus a valuable commodity, as his great friend Karl Radek, the presiding genius of the Comintern, was quick to realise. To the mercurial ...”

“... bright synchronic leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John ...”

“... from the fourth century, became models of the genre. Several medieval saints, among them Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Becket and Catherine of Siena, have Lives that are both richly textured and historically grounded, miracles notwithstanding. Hildegard of Bingen’s hagiographers even included her memoir. Yet there are many saints about whom next to ...”

“... its own unresolved memory of empire. Nicholas Henderson, a former Ambassador to Warsaw, Bonn, Paris and Washington, begins by acknowledging in his turn the ‘mystification’ and ‘misrepresentation’ attaching to the role, but takes a different tack. His memoirs are a defence of the traditional role of the ambassador, as someone who mediates between ...”

“... were directly inspired by Debray’s early writing, and Debray himself returned 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 ...”

“... Emilie Bardach did, and Robert Ferguson has found her diary (hitherto presumed to be lost) in a Paris library, and reprinted large chunks of it. It’s a good find, illuminating about both Bardach and Ibsen. The problem, however, is the way Ferguson applies this and other late Ibsen flirtations to the late Ibsen plays, and in particular to The Master ...”

“... on a motorbike: this was, he later said, ‘the act of a pioneer’. Still restless, he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julien, Matisse’s Cercle Russe – and the Moulin Rouge. He listened to Apollinaire, attended Gertrude Stein’s salon, shared a studio with Modigliani and became known – after the local gangsters – as ‘l’Apache qui ...”

“... lesbian relationships as part of its dance of shifting sexual liaisons in the public rooms of a Paris hotel; Song at Twilight (1965) is about a writer confronted by his homosexual past. But Semi-Monde was not performed in Coward’s lifetime (and is published for the first time in Collected Plays: Six) and Song at Twilight was premiered in the dying days of ...”

“... to see what it could do. ‘By the time the war ended,’ Freud said, ‘I was longing to go to Paris. I went in 1946 when you were allowed to go … It just seemed amazingly exciting.’ While there, he had an affair with Michael Wishart, who was 18 – Freud was 23 – and a nephew of a woman Freud had been close to, and a cousin of the woman who would be ...”