“... from the ‘golden age’ of crime mysteries. Dissolution also owes much to The Name of the Rose, though Umberto Eco’s glum postscript (‘Very little is discovered and the detective is defeated’) does not apply. Shardlake always gets his man (and/or woman).Dissolution introduces readers to Shardlake’s character and the condition of mid-Tudor ...”

“... severe to hit the regime since it had come into office, began in Lincolnshire. Columns of smoke rose above the English countryside. At one point the nation’s leader was tempted to take personal charge of the management of the crisis. But when the Lincolnshire problem proved to be shortlived, he unwisely wound the preventative operation down, persuading ...”

“... in the Winter Garden’. I didn’t plant a winter garden, but the book led on to his rose books: ‘The Old Shrub Roses’, ‘Shrub Roses of Today’, and the one about climbers and ramblers. (‘Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses’) It is this dilatory or sidelong compliance I am talking about. Here follows my own belated winter garden to the ...”

“... few exceptions … the West is silent about him. Even his beloved Italy and his still more beloved France show little receptivity to his life work. At the age of 80, despite his effort to sound sorrowful at the decline in his brother’s reputation, Thomas Mann could not disguise a vague undertone of satisfaction. At the end of the letter he noted that ‘it ...”

“... and sand of those buildings were used to reinforce the city ramparts.Arles is in the South of France, in Provence, on the lower part of the Rhône River, the marshy Rhône delta, on a limestone hill 25 metres above sea level. It was settled, successively, by Ligurians, Greeks from Phocaea, Celts, and in 46 BC by the Romans as a retirement colony for ...”

“... my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didn’t talk about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in ...”

“... the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes‘Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/’ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. ‘I know! ’Twas sweet gift,’ Stonebridge replied, then added: ‘We should make our own.’‘One ...”

“... have prevented him from becoming prime minister. In his last letter to Knox before leaving for France, he wrote: ‘I’m going to be rather odd. I’m not going to “pope” until after the war (if I’m alive).’ Volunteering for the war meant that at Oxford, as at Eton, he stayed only half the course, being ‘sent down by the Kaiser’ as he liked to ...”

“... energy supply now hinges on state-owned French companies based in Paris: Electricité de France, better known as EDF, and Areva, maker of nuclear power stations. Will EDF and Areva build a fleet of new nuclear reactors in Britain or won’t they, and if they do, how much will it cost the British and French public? Defending her record in Parliament ...”

“... La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her life guiding scores of refugees out of France across the Pyrenees – among them Walter Benjamin – before leaving by the same route. Several artists produced memorial sketches and artefacts, a practice begun by Spanish Republicans. Charlotte Salomon, the German painter who created an ...”

“... on with them through successive changes of habitat – moving to the United States in 1945, to France in 1955, to Switzerland in 1957 – until 1972.The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers ...”

“... for African resources. Some of these criticisms seem churlish. After all, the United States, France and Britain haven’t got much of a record of supporting human rights in Africa. Only last year Condoleezza Rice warmly welcomed the leader of Equatorial Guinea, a petrostate where the security forces reportedly gang-rape prisoners and the elite squirrels ...”

“... into an idol, and woe to him who will not bow before the idol of the day’. The time he spent in France before and after the failed revolution of 1848 introduced him to a resourceful bourgeoisie that had long ago subverted the ideals of 1789. But unlike Marx, who devised ever more ambitious schemes for supplanting the bourgeoisie with the working ...”

“... wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive’ at Ravensbrück ...”

“... the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He ...”