“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... forced to retreat, leaving the wounded to their fate in the burning fields. Sharon subsequently rose to prominence as head of the notorious ‘101’ unit which carried out reprisals for every border crossing – whether by fedayeen or Arab civilians. On several occasions, according to Benziman, he gave orders for attacks on civilians. He encouraged ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under his eyes: Alain Chartier, for instance – that the genre was learning, in post-Agincourt France, to depict the ‘despair’ which Huizinga (in accord with his poets) makes its dominant mood. The list of charges is easily extended, through the subjects Huizinga touches but whose subtleties he ignores because he wrote too soon: was old age more ...”

“... and abroad. He read voraciously in several languages: multi-volume histories of Rome, Britain, France and other Empires, as well as Euripides and Shakespeare, long passages of which he could quote from memory. A man of action who loved the limelight, he could also be notably discreet, so that his international network of friends made possible a series of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... constitution with the unstable history of revolutions, counter-revolutions and coups d’état in France since 1789. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 pointed up a further distinction, between the rigidity of America’s codified constitution – unsuited to absorbing change without convulsion – and Westminster’s looser, more flexible ...”

“... some 7 per cent – a structural predominance of the Right far greater than in Britain, let alone France. Even at the height of its success in 1972, the SPD could secure a margin of no more than 0.9 per cent over the CDU/CSU. This year, for the first time ever, the SPD was well ahead of its rival, scoring 5.7 per cent more than the CDU/CSU. This is a historic ...”