“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... whom they take to be nostalgic for the certainties of the self-contained nation state. The French government has cancelled plans to allow non-European residents to vote in local elections; Iain Duncan Smith is trying to drum up support for restricting freedom of movement within the EU. All over the continent, we are told that topics such as immigration ...”

“... but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction. The first three books each provided a snapshot of a particular point in Patrick’s life: his miserable, abused childhood in Provence in Never Mind (1992); his miserable, heroin-addicted twenties in Bad ...”

“... by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book ...”

“... in one part of Germany. All four occupying powers employed it in their judicial systems – the French only ended public executions in 1939 – and used it extensively against war criminals and others in the troubled years after 1945. The British, taking no chances, even imported the official hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, and ropes from Messrs Joh. Edgington ...”

“... gudgeon living on the refuse and detritus that’s carried by the Seine out of the sewers of French intellect into the dead water of the English Channel.’ This is indeed recognisable as Linklater’s voice, and for me it embodies no wisdom at all, let alone any thought as valuable as Lawrence’s. Lawrence really knew the intelligentsia whom Linklater ...”

“... and potential confessor by troubled and eccentric Catholic readers all over the world – like the French priest who ‘popped up unannounced and inopportunely one evening in Anacapri, as I was catching the bus to Capri with my mistress, trailing a smoke of dust from his long black soutane’. Twenty or thirty years ago, that casual allusion to a mistress ...”

“... moves swiftly to address the topic of the novel’s polygenesis (the ancient Greek novel, medieval French romance, fiction in pre-modern China), before launching successive sections entitled ‘The European Acceleration’ (mostly Britain and France), ‘The Circle Widens’ (America, Japan, India, Latin America, Africa) and ‘Towards World ...”

“... result, with the future Edward III in her company, she refused to return home after a visit to the French court. She was joined abroad by Roger Mortimer, and together they invaded England, gained wide support and, in January 1327, forced Edward II to abdicate in favour of his son. Edward III, however, was only 14 and it was Mortimer who now effectively ruled ...”

“... is appointing Crosland.’ He nodded to a handwritten envelope addressed to the President of the French Republic. I knew that it contained a letter declaring his willingness to become President of the European community. We talked for a while, and I sadly conceded that my resistance to his departure from British politics was at an end. A little before six ...”

“... it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the checks, and our minister smiled hack, and I no longer worried how it looked to others.’ As his voice broke, and he paused to dab at his ...”

“... all over the world. Sipping espresso at an outdoor café, I met a Swiss critic of contemporary French fiction, on his first trip to the United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly prepared for the MLA. ‘J’ai lu David Lodge,’ he boasted, brandishing his tattered copy of Small World. For the first ...”

“... based on drawings by ‘the best Masters’ of the day, artists such as Francis Barlow and the French academicians Charles Le Brun and Le Clerc) while framing the task as fundamentally accessible: ‘Made easier to the comprehension of Beginners than any book of this kind hitherto made publick.’ The copy from 1755 I looked at had the signature ‘Eliza ...”

“... Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far ...”

“... makes it hard not to view his work in parallel with the huge transformations that took place in French society during that period. Born near Lille in 1761, he received no formal training, but his early paintings impressed a local bishop, who arranged for him to work and study in Arras. When he arrived in Paris in 1785, Boilly specialised in cabinet ...”