“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is formed and crystallised. Crudely, the model is this. There was a Jewish officer working for the French General Staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who in 1894 was falsely accused and imprisoned for being a German spy. Once Emile Zola had written his famous ‘J’accuse’ open letter there was a great taking of sides, with the forces of the republican and ...”

“... comes, with a single exception, from a roll-call of the most celebrated divas of 20th-century French cinema: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Anouk Aimée, Brigitte Bardot. The actress asking the question has had to make do throughout an illustrious career with the relatively unsynchronised ‘Fabienne Dangeville’. She’s played by Catherine ...”

“... Yushchenko’s bloc, where he remained while negotiating a memorandum of collaboration with the French Front National. The invitation to Tyahnybok, in Andrew Wilson’s view, was an example of Yushchenko being a ‘bit too inclusive’, a judgment confirmed when, having changed the SNPU’s name to Svoboda, Tyahnybok praised the UPA for fighting ‘against ...”