“... a bargain between the five states which then possessed nuclear weapons – Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union and the United States – and the rest of the world. Countries ratifying the treaty as non-nuclear weapon states agreed not to develop or acquire such weapons. In return, they would be given access to nuclear technologies for energy ...”

“... ate no less than a thousand meals with journalists, mostly at sober, modest places like L’Ecu de France, where it is hard to eat for two (and partake of the standard rieslings) for less than £100. A passage about Eric Varley, the former Labour Secretary of State for Industry, echoes the contrast in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden ...”

“... When the Germans occupied His Pasteur Institute With all those poor dogs Paulin has also praised Peter Reading for being ‘user-hostile’, and for contriving, by avoiding iambs, to demonstrate ‘his dissidence from the state’. The preface to Paulin’s excellent Faber Book of Vernacular Verse explains his preference for demotic diction and the natural ...”

“... the world offered similar ‘protection’ to the British Empire’s Muslim subjects, and France claimed to be a ‘puissance musulmane’ when it came to fighting the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Like all other colonised populations, Muslims adapted to the imposed new order, adopted it, appropriated it, and were profoundly shaped and reshaped by it. It is ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... he became the most complex and perhaps the most creative theoretician of freedom in 19th-century France, and in the last part of his life, he was an eloquent exponent of liberal thought in the Chamber of Deputies. Constant’s model of liberalism was constructed against the experience of the competing tyrannies of his lifetime: the Jacobin ‘Republic of ...”

“... From the artist’s point of view, as Roos shows, the reasons are clear. In mid-19th-century France, the Salon was the public exhibition which mattered, the only dunghill on which the competing cocks could crow. No other way of showing your work – private exhibitions, group exhibitions, displays by picture dealers, sales of prints – could equal ...”

“... Olympics and that she had had a hand in arranging a state consultancy job for a colleague. In France, 24th on the list, Jacques Chirac famously refused to resign in the face of claims that he had received substantial illegal payments for public works contracts while mayor of Paris and president of the Gaullist Party. In Poland (No. 49), soon after the ...”

“... in his life, from his comfortable student days in turn-of-the-century Vienna, to his grand tour of France and Germany, and then England, where he stayed for more than a year. Indeed, in 1907, when he was 24, he actually married an Englishwoman some 12 years older than he was, and took the intrepid Gladys off to Egypt, though he subsequently – and rather ...”

“... as ‘the First Europeans’. Their loudest promoter was President Chirac, determined to keep France in the van of intellectual Euromania. But even the French have failed to prove that, when the Dmanisi folk emerged from Africa, they turned left for Paris. They may just as well have hung a right for Tehran or Kabul. Now comes ‘Old Europe’. The Oxford ...”

“... Kubrick’s Lolita, handsomely set up by the director and beautifully spun out by the actor. Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to his hotel room to have sex, as he ...”

“... few decades, through the publication of multi-volume national histories of the book (1982-86 in France, ongoing in Britain and elsewhere); through the efforts of a professional society with a prominent journal (Book History), a hyperactive discussion list (sharp-l@listserv.indiana.edu), and an overstuffed website (www.sharpweb.org); and eventually through ...”

“... economic and social history is a battlefield of controversies. As Crouzet remarks: ‘unlike in France, the conclusions of the most eminent writers do not become dogmas and are soon challenged.’ But it may be that even the British debate, for all its vigour and its taste for ‘criticism, not to say hypercriticism’, consists of ad hoc dispute within a ...”

“... I was so angry​ ,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown up rich in Connecticut and New York, attended Yale, but found himself in ‘combat with the world’ for reasons he couldn’t understand; his early novels reflect this ...”