“... Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ‘postcolonial left’. This isn’t always a pleasant role. In April 2020, a few months before he was due to deliver the opening lecture at the Ruhrtriennale, Mbembe was told that ...”

“... one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the department, upped sticks in 2009 to become global head of health for the consultants KPMG. This last move did have the advantage of giving an insight into what had actually been going on in Whitehall ...”

“... like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the 1890s the same transition was held to have ‘sullied’ his poetic inspiration and ‘buried’ it in ‘the dust ...”

“... had reached 130 million; between 1909 and 1929 the estimated revenue in the magazine market rose from 54 million dollars to 320 million dollars. Magazines in the 1920s were, as Woodhead puts it, ‘the most influential vehicle in creating dreams, establishing trends and swaying consumer opinion’ and the two women understood very well the need to ...”

“... stock market in October 1929, conservative governments were in office in the United States, France and Sweden, while there were social democratic governments in Britain and Germany. All, however, were more or less indistinguishably faithful to the economic orthodoxies of the period: a commitment to sound money – that is, the gold standard – and ...”

“... states reveals about the institutional capacities of particular states, especially Britain and France. In both instances, the historical development of welfare states, rather than the character, causes and implications of contemporary disputes, is the main subject. It may well be that the historical understanding thus arrived at will illuminate ...”

“... plummet, so that by mid-century her work was selling for around a fiftieth of its former value. In France, her achievements were quickly eclipsed by the avant-garde, who cringed at the animalier genre of painting in which she specialised; even in her beloved Fontainebleau, the bronze bull erected to her memory was melted down by the Nazis and never ...”

“... the president of a country which has taken on the mantle of empire inherited from Britain and France and is determined to remain in the Middle East for reasons of oil and of geo-strategic and political advantage. There has been a great deal of talk about linkage, a word I find ugly and a concept I find ...”

“... His share was to be Gibraltar and French Morocco. Confidence became certainty after the fall of France, and at that point he announced Spain’s renunciation of neutrality in favour of non-belligerency, meanwhile providing German U-boats and crews with harbours and refuelling facilities that enabled them to extend their range to the north coast of ...”

“... Quisling’s friends and family, and matters only improved when Alexandra was packed off to France and eventually to the United States. Thereafter, Quisling and Maria lived together as man and wife. He now needed money, since for all his moralising he always liked to live well. In 1925, he approached the Norwegian Labour Party and offered to help them ...”

“... directed to Mexico’s uneasy relationship with the outside world – he was Mexican Ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977. As a novelist, he explores the internal character of his country, in Where the air is clear, his first novel, originally published in 1958, in The Death of Artemio Cruz and in Terra Nostra. His novels feel their way along the paradoxes ...”

“... Laissez-écrire matched the laissez-faire of Lebanon’s unbridled individualism. Elsewhere, France, Germany, Britain and the United States have served as varyingly hospitable destinations, temporary or permanent, for many Arab thinkers. But it would be naive to imagine that mere distance is a guarantor of freedom, or, in extreme ...”

“... and James; but his poetry was not much read, and he himself (or his reputation) not much liked. In France, where he lived from 1910 to 1915, he was seen as a phoney and a sponger. ‘He is a child,’ the novelist René Boylesve said; ‘he gives himself away with a thousand lies and tricks.’ In England his reputation was summed up by Lord Vansittart of the ...”

“... from America, starts writing poetry and joins the army, to die four years later in combat in France. It is a frantic and harassed life in many ways, but Wilson tells her story at just the right pace, with patience and clarity, though occasionally her irritation with Thomas’s self-indulgent and self-dramatising misery breaks through – ‘The image he ...”

“... international legitimacy and a potentially invaluable ally against England’s traditional enemy, France. For the 16-year-old Catherine, by contrast, marriage to the Prince of Wales in November 1501 must have seemed like a parachute descent to an alien and unappealing planet. She spoke not a word of English, and both she and her entourage found English ...”