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“... philosophical and more French. He devised an elaborate stratagem to get Voltaire expelled from France so that he would move to Berlin and take charge of his cultural revolution, but the scheme misfired, and Voltaire ended up for a while as official historian to the French court. Friedrich then turned to another French superstar, the mathematician Pierre ...”

“... to Hitler – and all the more so as his foreign policy grew more aggressive and risky. As in France and to a lesser extent in Britain, the colossal loss of life in the First World War still haunted the German public. But Hitler knew how to manipulate that fear. Each time Germany seemed to be steering towards the brink of war – the reoccupation of the ...”

“... was the all-round professionalism and esprit honed by constant conflict all over 11th-century France. For more than a century this fighting style carried almost all before it, until in 1187, in Palestine, the opposition began to get its act together. Crouch’s book tells the story of William’s family, one of the two Norman families that made ...”

“... worth £1.64 on the day of sale. The average value of the shares of the two generating companies rose by 171 per cent between 1991 and 1995; the shares of the RECs rose by 200 per cent in the same period, while the average gain to shareholders of those RECs taken over by another company has been 356 per cent. Fat-cat ...”

“... This was widely understood to be a solemn and significant national event, but when Howard rose to speak, he wagged a finger at the audience and hectored them on the virtues of his amendments to the Native Title Act. A number of black Australians rose and turned their backs. Meanwhile, the long-running enquiry into ...”

“... randomly taken, and mocked by grandiloquent chapter titles (‘A Star is Born’, ‘Mighty Like a Rose’). The sequence records her birth inter faeces (her mother has taken an ill-timed overdose of salts); her ungrateful father, desperate for a ‘laddie’, names her after the passing milkman’s horse; the narrative jumps seven years to the heroine’s ...”

“... in his life, from his comfortable student days in turn-of-the-century Vienna, to his grand tour of France and Germany, and then England, where he stayed for more than a year. Indeed, in 1907, when he was 24, he actually married an Englishwoman some 12 years older than he was, and took the intrepid Gladys off to Egypt, though he subsequently – and rather ...”

“... social democracy and the welfare state were to be at their peak’. Trade union membership rose to its maximum point; inequality reached its lowest. Edgerton even debunks the 1979 Winter of Discontent which is supposed to have propelled Thatcher to power. Almost 30 million working days were lost by strikes that year – but 20.7 million of them were ...”

“... matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who’s had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the notorious Papin sisters – real-life models for the homicidal domestics in Genet’s The Maids – disembowelled their bourgeois mistress and her daughter in a fit of bestial frenzy after the unfortunate Mme Lancelin complained once too often ...”

“... global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America – Europe is back!’ In France, Marcel Gauchet, theorist of democracy and an editor of Le Débat, the country’s central journal of ideas, explains, more demurely, that ‘we may be allowed to think that the formula the Europeans have pioneered is destined eventually to serve as a ...”

“... the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern counties, and one notional, made up of the 26 remaining counties which had Nationalist majorities. Following de Valera’s ...”

“... been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into the exposition of a novel rather than a novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a ...”

“... On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s hands and face; he glowed like an avenger ... There was no prey that night. At 3.46 Prosser set course for base. He ...”

“... the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo, but if Osborne shows any American influence it is from the earlier generation of O’Neill, or even Odets. There were intermittently fine productions on the London stage: ‘revivals’ of classics at the Old Vic, and under the not always benign ...”

“... I have got lots of French books because I am an artist who loves Surrealism, which flourished in France. Mostly I look at the pictures, though I have read quite a few in translation. Imagine my shock when I read in the 20 March issue of the London Review, in Edmund Leach’s review of Lévi-Strauss’s latest, The View from Afar, that ‘the essay on Max ...”