“... doorstopper – the ‘encyclopedic’ novel – which includes such celebrated behemoths as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Although mustering a meagre 482 pages to their 1079 and 827, The Last Samurai is vauntingly expansive in both form and ambition. As a subgenre, the encyclopedic novel develops ...”

“... is better informed about the fake soldier, ‘Sergeant Farthing’, claiming that his real name is David Jones and that he is a Welshman loosely attached to the London theatre. As for ‘Mr Bartholomew’, the actor says he believes him to be something of a philosopher, with a dissident and free-thinking bias, a certain mathematical or numerological expertise ...”

“... monuments of geological time that extended far beyond the records of ancient civilisations. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, thought that the Earth had been formed from the debris of a comet that had collided with the sun. He heated iron balls in the forge of his estate in Burgundy and, based on how quickly they cooled ...”

“... in October 1945; Philippe Henriot, minister of propaganda for the Vichy government, shot by the French Resistance in June 1944. There was a place in Pound’s poem, it seems, for more or less any minor Axis celebrity who came to grief. And he was through with being nice to Churchill, that ‘sputtering tank of nicotine and/stale whiskey’. At the same ...”

“... of rescue, and pansexual before that term was in use. (He sometimes slept with his friend, the French actor Christian Marquand.) Mann uses that New School punch-up to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he ...”

“... unclear, but the convention was well established in Europe by the Middle Ages. ‘Grimoire’ is French for ‘grammary’, a book of grammar: it may have been adopted because the manuscripts were often in Latin; perhaps it was a term used more generally of abstruse, esoteric texts. Certainly, grimoires had been around for many hundreds of years before they ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect ...”

“... culture. It is possible to have an innovatory establishment, of course: in different ways, the French and the Japanese both have one. But theirs are Napoleonic establishments, based on the principle of the carrière ouverte aux talents, rigorously meritocratic and systematically trained. The British establishment, with its still essentially nepotistic ...”

“... work on republican imagery and symbolism in 19th-century France, and speculated as to why the French put up statues to principles and ideals, while the English commemorate princes and idols. All in all, this is a well-meaning but slightly claustrophobic book: rather like Albert himself. ‘A town hall,’ Sir Charles Barry observed in 1859, ‘should in ...”

“... granted Matilda any land or castles in England. He had refused to have her crowned, ignoring the French practice according to which the heir to the throne was always crowned during the father’s lifetime. Henry, still vigorous in his sixties, didn’t want to yield any authority, but this meant that Matilda had neither the power nor the status to make an ...”

“... but against royal government. There was frustration at its failure to protect coastal areas from French attacks combined with fury at its demands for large sums of money through successive poll taxes to finance the foreign adventures of the king’s uncles John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock. The former wanted the money to make himself king of Castile, the ...”

“... her tone, changes the subject and discards her objectivity. Richard Cobb once wrote that a lot of French history could be walked, seen and above all heard in cafés and buses, and on park benches in Paris or Lyon. But few British, American or even Indian academics today write as if they have ever sat in a Delhi rickshaw or a café in Calcutta. They spend too ...”

“... at their most intense wherever there was no immediate boundary to the visual field. Westphal’s French counterpart, Legrand du Saulle, spoke instead of a ‘peur des espaces’, which struck not only in streets and squares, but on bridges and ferries, or when looking out of an upstairs window. Legrand’s patients included a Madame B., who found that she ...”

“... but on the harbour. In a series of frames, Napoleon and his men approach a fort where English and French royalist soldiers are celebrating. Part of the amazement is that the attackers should manage to be so stealthy, given the number of cannon they are using. Fighting begins and the republicans are too swift for their enemies, although quite a few of them die ...”

“... These books are the recent work of one of the leading exponents of the ‘new’ history of the French school. The historical achievement of French academics over the last twenty years has set an example to historians in all other countries. French demographers have reopened the whole topic of population change, devising new techniques, asking new questions, and combining accurate measurement with insight into social constraints and mental pathways ...”