“... 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 ...”

“... buckled, and he wrote an open letter to – of all people – Rufus Isaacs, now involved in the Paris Peace Conference. Cecil’s death had brought to an end ‘the great Marconi duel’ they had been fighting, Chesterton began grandly. Isaacs’s actions in 1913 and his ‘type of politics’ had discredited the nation, Chesterton wrote, and he couldn’t ...”

“... connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.Simone’s father, Bernard Weil, was a successful doctor. Her mother, Selma, had wanted to study medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it. Thoroughly assimilated French Jews, Simone’s parents practised no religion, and didn’t tell their children that they were Jewish until ...”

“... A few years ago I was flying from Paris to Copenhagen on a day of calm and perfect weather. The flight took me over the sea beyond the coast of Holland, and looking down I was able to see in full detail the landscape below sea level, with its hills and valleys and – astonishingly – a lake: an accumulation of dark-blue water at the bottom of a valley, sharply separated from its lighter surroundings and maintained by some unknown physical process ...”

“... Disco was much more and much better than all that.’ Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La ...”