“... 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 ...”

“... exiled, waving from twenty thousand leagues Under force eights the Lusitania, Hood, Tirpitz, Mary Rose lie barnacled, Cell-like binnacles of another life Lost to the world above but frozen here Among squid, mantas, coral, nameless shoals Writhing in a lurid, marine Somme Is the sea Scottish? What are the oceans’ flags? Britannia is ash on the surface of the ...”

“... the varying line-lengths of free verse, and even with rhyme: ‘A constellation of pinkish bubbles rose up under my feet then drifted, swole, each bubble’s angle reflecting a diamond nova from both its north and south pole.’ The swole/pole consonance is an alienation effect, immediately drawing attention to the writer’s exertions, and one wonders where ...”

“... hinterlands (the US, Russia) could rely on internal markets; some Continental states (Germany, France) sought for strategic or political reasons to shelter their agricultural sectors. Britain chose to outsource production, in the process creating a networked global economy of food. Take meat. Even in the early 19th century Britons ate more meat – 75 ...”

“... not, as historians have tended to portray it, an uninspiring moment for feminism. Suffragists in France, with support from elsewhere, demanded that the Paris Peace Conference involve women in the negotiations and that participating countries commit to the principle of women’s suffrage. Wilson received their delegations but had little interest in their ...”

“... invasions by her neighbours. She succeeded admirably at the former, but less well at the latter. France, Prussia and Bavaria saw her accession as an opportunity to challenge Habsburg power. Frederick of Prussia took advantage of her uncertain position by annexing much of prosperous Silesia. Charles Albert of Bavaria invaded the kingdom of Bohemia and became ...”

“... suing for peace with the Axis. What really did for Chamberlain was the ignominious retreat from France. As the embittered men of the British Expeditionary Force poured back into the country, in what Robert Boothby described as ‘a highly inflamed state of mind’, the government’s Home Intelligence unit noted a growing wave of ...”

“... it becomes easier to imagine an English Enlightenment: one showing critical differences from the France of the Philosophes. In addition, Porter’s work on the histories of geology and medicine in 18th-century England revealed an intellectual regime far less torpid than that described by Gibbon (about whom Porter has also published an elegant and penetrating ...”