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“... smiling tolerance among his menaces of damnation’. Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape ...”

“... being prone to clowning and lavatory humour. Think of the babyish and buffoonish Amadeus of Peter Shaffer’s play. Or the impetuous, tousle-haired and disconcertingly North American figure in the Milos Forman film, stalked through the Vienna night by Antonio Salieri to the sound of the Dies irae from the Requiem. Franz Niemetschek, Mozart’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since ...”

“... documents from the Germans, and Donovan’s OSS armed and trained guerrilla bands everywhere from France to Indochina. SOE became OSS’s benefactor, training its agents at Camp X in Canada and working with them in the field, a legacy that would shift the focus of OSS’s successor agency, the CIA, away from the humdrum routine of intelligence-gathering ...”

“... Captagon was fuelling a grim cult of battlefield atrocities. An investigation by Vanity Fair in France last April uncovered a trail of testimonies and video images of pumped-up soldiers and ‘zombies roaming, all smiles, across fields of ruins and severed heads’. Caches of pills in ports and abandoned villages supplied the evidence. On 13 November ...”

“... he would win easily. This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006. Peter Hallward: Haiti is a profoundly divided country, and you have always been a profoundly divisive figure. For most of the 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the ...”

“... here the accounts of political pressures; here are the maps – possessions of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise. What lies behind it all? History of this kind maximises one’s information, minimises doubt. Its authors are pressed into shorthand statements, which ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... throws it away in disgust. Perec’s father, born in Poland, was killed fighting for his adopted France in the Second World War; his mother was murdered, probably at Auschwitz; Perec himself – whose subject was always really the Holocaust, even when he seemed merely to be executing kabbalistic permutations of character and situation – survived by hiding ...”

“... not particularly sympathetic. He is usually on holiday, in East Anglia or an old town in France or Denmark. He is staying in an inn or a hotel, an uncongenial sort of place far from his familiar institutional comforts. In fact he is way out of his comfort zone. And then it begins … the tapping at the window or the rustling or the tangling of the ...”

“... no surprise that the co-editors of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham, are an academic lawyer and a political scientist. Nevertheless they steer away from stale orthodoxies and insular complacency, interrogating instead Whig assumptions about English exceptionalism. Tamar Herzog questions the ...”

“... of war and of tumult Resound into the unbounded night. And he had the same sympathy for enemy France, where ‘the pale mother nourishes her child to the deadly slaughter.’ So oppressive were the rich and great, Robert Crowley declared in 1550, that ‘we must needs fight it out, or else be brought to the like slavery that the Frenchmen are ...”

“... The people’s game without the people,’ the football commentator Peter Drury said on 12 March, introducing BT Sport’s coverage of the Europa League fixture between Wolverhampton Wanderers and the Greek side Olympiacos. ‘It’s not the same for you and it’s not the same without you.’ The match was taking place behind closed doors, as all sporting events will be for the foreseeable future ...”