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“... 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 ...”

“... programme of the exhibition included a range of sports that were popular in late 19th-century France: motor races and ballooning, fishing and pigeon racing, as well as mass displays featuring thousands of gymnasts and archers, golf and polo parties, school sports, events for women and children, and – least Olympic of all – professionals competing in ...”

“... In France, we do it lying down,’ a French minister is reported to have said on first seeing the tango. He was not far wrong. The tango crystallised at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires. It was a dance of prostitutes and pimps, and in its ineluctable rhythms, its belly-to-belly stance, its interlacing of legs, it reflected their professional concerns ...”

“... the French Prophets. This millenarian group, founded by Camisard refugees escaping persecution in France, had at its heart a number of divinely inspired prophets. When Lacy first encountered them, he found them telling of a ‘glorious Dispensation, touching the Vocation of the Jews, the Conversion of all Nations, the Destruction of Antichrist, an universal ...”

“... year he became the co-founder and majority shareholder of the literary magazine Mercure de France, which provided an outlet for his prolific output. His commercial breakthrough came in 1892 when he published L’Ecornifleur (‘The Scrounger’), which recounts the story of a parasitical man of letters. A number of novels, many of them with ...”