“... help had joyfully learnt its language: relatives rolled about laughing when Elias recited a French story he had learnt at school with a strong British accent. The father, a gentle, civilised man, hoped that his eldest son would go to university in England and perhaps become a doctor or teacher. Had he lived, his son’s destiny would have been very ...”

“... married to an American – to put it more precisely, I was married to an American citizen whose French father and Canadian mother, themselves immigrants, lived in the States. We had no children, and America would surely be new and exciting. We might even stay there for a few years – five at the most?I have now lived 18 years in the United States. It’s a ...”

“... by the Russian representative in New York in June 1920. But according to the Sinn Féin envoy Patrick McCartan – writing to a Soviet official from neighbouring Estonia on his way back to Ireland from Russia in June 1921 – this had not been seriously considered by de Valera because of McCartan’s doubts about when ‘your representatives speak for ...”

“... possessed in his books and his reviews, the Olympian, Nabokovian grand view. I wished I was French or English. I hated the arguments. I always saw both sides and then could see above the whole thing, see how inevitable the mess had become, once that vast plain in the south of England, those huge fertile fields, began to produce a surplus and there was ...”

“... judge makes the ultimate determination, there are taboos concerning public commentary. When a French government minister and the prosecutor publicly asserted the guilt of one defendant, Patrick Allenet de Ribemont, France was held by Strasbourg to have breached his right to a fair trial. How then to achieve a fair trial ...”

“... is fast forgetting all his German. This seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to ...”

“... He also took against the Corsicans, who combined ‘the worst qualities of the Italians and the French’. Later, when he was nearly forty and owned a house in Verbier, he delivered his opinion on the Swiss, or, as he put it, ‘the goddam Swiss’: they were, he wrote, ‘the ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He ...”

“... according to Sargent, because they are both destroyers of international order. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has apparently ended the American world order, or, as Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana. Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even though ...”

“... the article would not be published, although the Butterworth map and many photographs by the young French photographer Gilles Peress appeared in the Sunday Times on 6 February. Humphry returned to London and I remained in Derry, as described in my memo. I have not subsequently discussed the non-publication of the article with Harry Evans, although he did tell ...”

“... that faintly menacing suavity, where it is we’re going? Johnny at 14 is obsessed with Bastien, a French exchange student who is staying with his family, and longing for a return to the intensity of connection they enjoyed the previous year, in France, before Bastien became so focused on girls. The two boys go on a trip with Johnny’s father and a business ...”

“... inclined. Aiming high, he applied to work with Ernest Rutherford. Rejected, he turned to Patrick Blackett, a glamorous experimenter whom contemporaries described as ‘a young Oedipus’. Oppenheimer was miserable, near collapse, bedevilled by sexual frustration and academic anxieties. He lacked the practical skills needed for experimental ...”

“... and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying ...”

“... critically we are stitched into the particulars of the places where we choose to make our home. Patrick Keiller, a scrupulous observer from the misted windows of trains, added the Nine Elms Coal Hopper to his album of found architecture. The site was demolished in the winter of 1979-80, before being squatted by a car breaker. The Hopper lives on in ...”

“... rearmament of Iran and Iraq. They had their hero in Alan Clark at Trade and their bogey-man in the French, who as all decent Brits know, will sell anything to absolutely anybody. At the meeting on 21 December, the three ministers agreed to relax the third guideline. Whereas it had previously said (my italics), ‘we should not in future sanction new orders for ...”

“... in 1942. That same year it became the only Sunday newspaper not to cover the Allied landings in French North Africa; when the news broke, David rang the paper at 2.30 on a Sunday morning to find that practically everyone had gone home. There was a lot to change. In 1945, when he first began to work full-time for the paper, he told his mother that once ...”