“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... different in character from a literary text. Using the best of both the Anglo-American and the French approaches to philosophy, he assiduously avoids philosophical exaggeration in developing his novel theory of interpretation. This book on Nietzsche is thus an example of a ‘genealogical’ method that anyone could apply to any text and author. Nietzsche ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... frontiers in the making of nations. If Henry of Northumbria had not predeceased his father, King David I of Scotland, in 1152, Britain might have been divided at the Humber into two more equally sized political units, the kingdom of Greater Scotland (incorporating northern England) and the kingdom of Little England (made up of the midlands and south). Not ...”

“... dreamy letters and poems like ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’. François Georges-Picot, a French consular officer in Beirut, also withdrew after war was declared. His legacy was a packet of letters implicating local notables in a conspiracy to detach Syria from the Ottoman Empire. Georges-Picot had lodged his papers at the American consulate and a ...”

“... holidays but never getting around to it. Something about the title kept putting me off: that cosy French chez followed by a harsher, doubly foreign surname. But I must have started it once, because there was a boarding-card stub stuck in at the end of the first chapter. So, twenty years on, it was time finally to follow Anita’s advice. That harsh, clashing ...”

“... laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of 1953? ‘Oh, the election! Never has anything been so hysterically funny.’ (Never?) In 1967, reading about the increased number of coloured immigrants to England, ‘of course I screamed with laughter.’ When a Spaniard suggests to ...”

“... world’s most sought-after directors of cinematography. He is most closely associated with the French cinema, having shot nine of Truffaut’s films and seven of Rohmer’s, but recently his Oscar for Malick’s Days of Heaven has encouraged Americans to take a chance on this independent Spaniard who has three times been exiled – from Franco’s ...”