“... director of operations was Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Its legal draftsman was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, a right-wing libertarian with potent credentials as a principal prosecutor at Nuremberg. It was Maxwell Fyfe who told a Conservative Party rally in 1948 that just as Nazism had crept first gradually and then irresistibly into German ...”

“... superpower of the 16th century, standing in the way of Habsburg domination of the continent, was France. Conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois French flared intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, ...”

“... work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it ...”

“... nations at face value. Of course, historians of England have examined the Plantagenet empire in France and the global empire acquired in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they have rarely considered the implications of such extended territorial acquisitions for England itself. Only recently has the geographical question of England come more clearly into ...”

“... a flourish: ‘Among the many groups of people who suffered at the hands of the Ancien Régime in France – the insane, the poor, sodomites, alchemists and blasphemers – the impotent have long been forgotten.’ With these words, Darmon carefully places himself in the tradition of the late Michel Foucault, his history of madness as well as his more ...”

“... of Cold War politics and the nuclear threat. They played themselves out very differently in France, Italy, Germany and the US, and differently again in the Soviet Union as compared to the East European satellites (not to speak of the Third World, which figures peripherally at best in histories of the cultural Cold War). Take the fundamentally different ...”

“... and whimsical at the same time.’ Patrick is the damaged, scornful victim of his father, David Melrose, ‘descended from Charles II through a prostitute’. Centuries of damp arrest have created the monstrous David: ‘The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing-room ...”

“... and organisations; and he draws illuminating contemporary comparisons with the United States, France, Germany and Australia. He has tackled mainstream political and economic history, and tried his hand at biography; he is highly sensitive to art and architecture, poetry and literature, culture and ideology; and he has been a much-emulated pioneer in ...”

“... took over from more ceremonial forms of greeting around 1800: in Britain first, then in Holland, France and Russia. In his Memoirs, written in the 1790s, Casanova describes a ‘shake-hand amical’ bestowed on one of his London acquaintances. Madame Bovary provides evidence that the handshake was still regarded, in ...”

“... if it hadn’t been for the way Zidane ended the last game of his career in July. Captaining France in the final of the World Cup, he was sent off for violent conduct: in what must immediately have become one of the most widely seen sporting images of all time, he drives his head – forcefully and, it must be said, with considerable grace – into Marco ...”

“... en route from Livorno to England, was captured by two French warships off the Spanish coast. France having joined the War of Independence on the side of the Americans, the Westmorland’s captain, Willis Machell, was prepared for trouble. He had a crew of sixty and 22 cannons, but was outgunned. The ship was towed into Málaga and declared a legal trophy ...”

“... are to imagine he will never stop thinking of her, alive or dead, but Scott and his screenwriter, David Scarpa, seem to have gone to sleep for this part of the story, leaving the film to invent its own language and emotions according to whatever clichés it can find. Things get worse when the film takes up the tale of Napoleon’s need for an heir and ...”

“... cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his title in the university catalogue from ‘professor’ to ‘swami’; teach ‘The Wisdom of the East’ instead of ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner’; and replace the furniture in his office with a simple ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... but close to the shore in Filey Bay.In 1779 the War of Independence was in its fifth year. France, keen to exact revenge on Britain for the Seven Years’ War, had signed a treaty with the Thirteen Colonies, effectively declaring war on its old enemy. Spain, too, declared war on Britain, and hatched a plan with ...”