“... by the Simplon-Orient Express. I wanted sorely to talk to Tito. The Simplon-Orient began from France in grand style. There were wagon-lits, wagon-restaurants, for the first twenty-four hours. I was taken along the corridor for dinner by a German businessman, who had found me when I was standing up by a window outside my compartment. A fourth-class ...”

“... bits of the ‘brilliantly flawed lifetimes’, as he puts it, of the dreadful Duke and Duchess. Peter Watson’s Sotheby’s: Inside Story is also related to a television programme – one that appeared the year before, in 1997. Here the auction house was accused of conniving in the sale of illegally excavated and exported antiquities and of organising the ...”

“... Lear, through Greene the plot of Winter’s Tale, Orsino alludes to him, Hamlet quotes him. In France, at least, the fashion lasted. The young Racine, at Port Royal, learned Heliodorus by heart; Mlle de Scudéry outprosed her model in Le Grand Cyrus, the pap of a whole generation. P.D. Huet, the first historian of the novel, summed it up in ...”

“... In both the country avoided invasion and ultimately evaded defeat, if only because in each case France was in the front line, because Russia suffered most of the casualties, and because the United States tardily but effectively identified its own interests with those of Great Britain. So it seems natural to expect recognition for the two war leaders who ...”

“... Dyck’s own eye in all this. Some 17th and early 18th-century painters from the Low Countries and France leave windows open on themselves, as in Rubens’s drawings of his family, Rembrandt’s of his neighbours, Watteau’s of his friends. Van Dyck could as easily be a Spaniard or an Italian when it comes to pictorial unbuttoning. An exception is the ...”

“... account to date of this extraordinary voyage.Cunliffe’s narrative takes Pytheas across France by the Aude-Garonne tin route, more than 2500 km shorter than the sea-haul round the Iberian peninsula. He correlates his voyager’s surprisingly accurate astronomical observations with the latitudes involved (Pytheas got the length of the British ...”

“... miraculous however closely you look, makes sunlight dapple the stone with tiny shadows of ivy. Peter Van Lerberghe, a lesser artist, catches a lesser, but no doubt more common, scene of Tintern by moonlight aswarm with tourists climbing over it with torches to make the right dramatic shadows before ticking a now hackneyed experience off the to-see ...”

“... was A ruler devious and weak A balding dandy, foe to work By mere chance in glory sheltered. … France once again in Bourbon hands, In Albion’s, the seas. The Pole Has freedom now. And we? Applause from country dames, Didactic odes, no more. Perhaps some future day we, too, Will, like the rest, come in To freedom’s charming halls, At ...”

“... evacuation from the Basque country if they didn’t – but were allowed to marry in the South of France, with both mothers in attendance. The early sections of Peter Sussman’s Decca, a vast collection of Mitford’s letters, cover this period. For those who take pleasure in the ironies of epistolary communication (or ...”

“... have happened in Italy but for Allied intervention. Belgium too found itself on the brink, as did France, in areas where the Resistance and the quasi-fascist Milice fought street battles and staged summary executions. The separation of Vichy from the ‘zone occupée’ was a painful lesson about the faultlines of nationhood. Here, as with the bombing of ...”

“... of caviar are available all year round.‘People are gaining more confidence in sushi,’ said Peter Morrison, Manager, Trading Division. ‘We have joined forces with very credible traders such as Yo! Sushi and we aim to educate customers by bringing them here.’ Alison handed me a cup of liquid grass from the fresh juice bar, Crussh. There was something ...”

“... Carolingian imperial politics and cultivated a network of monasteries that reached into modern-day France, Italy, Austria and Belgium. The curators are keen to emphasise the abbey’s cultural significance and its connections across a continent as yet undivided by nation-states. It’s the individual stories that stand out, however, even if many are filtered ...”

“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power and ...”

“... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”