“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... involvement in industry but the future of Britain’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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ghetto; David Sassoon (1792-1864), heir to a distinguished Baghdadi-Jewish dynasty, who fled the political machinations of his hometown for British India; Joseph Evzel Gunzburg (1812-78), an alcohol magnate from Podolia with a prestigious rabbinic genealogy stretching ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... years, like most other Premiership sides, it has of course much changed its character. It has a French manager and is now an Anglo-French-Dutch-African side. Yet its ‘spirit’, for those who believe in these things, has changed less. It remains a side capable of heroic deeds; but it does nothing easily and lives on its ...”

“... Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe ...”

“... of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding and David Schubert. ‘I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,’ Ashbery says, and one can imagine some members of his audience gasping. In the introduction to his 1966 anthology, 19th-Century British Minor Poets, Auden provides four tests for being a ...”