“... was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to use as thread bobbins at court. Rebellion spontaneously combusted on nearby estates. The nobility at Stühlingen received 62 complaints relating to abuses ...”

“... to bring him into the conversation. The meal dragged on into the late evening. When everyone rose from the table, Chekhov was obviously in a bad mood, and on the pretext of feeling tired, retired to his room without saying goodnight. Savva and I retreated to the wing of the house where I was living, to talk business without being disturbed. At the time I ...”

“... in which he attacked the Whigs as the descendants of ‘poor, degraded, dishonoured, Atheistical France’ and sniffed out the Jacobin threat they posed to the established church. That was pitching it pretty high even by contemporary standards. ‘I love our fine British peasantry,’ he told Richmond, ‘think best of the old high Tories, because I find ...”

“... command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings. Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine ...”

“... real liberation. Financed by the family trusts, she made her way in 1916 to the battlefields of France, where she drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross. Between runs to the trenches, she shared a flat in Montparnasse with several other girl-drivers, one of whom, Dolly Wilde, louche niece of Oscar and member of the expatriate lesbian circle around ...”

“... it in 1999 with a knighthood in the Légion d’Honneur. Parker, Chirac said, has ‘served France by bringing prestige to the country with his particular gift’. He was the man who ‘taught America about French wine’, though it wasn’t long before Parker missed his annual tasting trip to France, citing family ...”

“... to what was going on in its bailiwick. In January last year, the citizens of Naples finally rose up in furious protests against the mounds of putrescence visited on them. The damage to centre-left rule was immeasurable. Two months later, its downfall combined, with peculiar local aptness, the outcomes of the tactical and moral blindness of the ...”

“... plant, while the German tutor she sees on her travels is a duck: Of course, while in Romantic France I met with Cupid and Romance. One glimpse at my rejected suitor – He was a handsome German tutor. But no! I would be no man’s wife … More appealing is a ‘dear friend’ she meets in the Tuileries: With flowers and little birds galore She quenched ...”

“... following, especially in his late years, when his work was anchored by climate change. In France environmentalist activism – ecology – had taken off in the late 1960s. It had to bide its time before it gained a foothold as a minority party-political movement, and even then at local, regional and European rather than national level. In round one of ...”

“... and college syllabuses and the pass Stein gets for her persistent, primitivist racialism. (‘Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people,’ she writes, typically, in ‘Melanctha’.) The racial reading of ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ and gloss on ‘St Louis Blues’ are of course blatantly ‘literary’, which doesn’t go against ...”

“... are illuminating. His conviction that Wolsey’s policies were not affected by his pension from France – which was anyway a meagre proportion of his income – is given weight by his comparison of the 16th-century pension with the 20th-century business lunch. Both sweeteners may reinforce motives of policy: neither will be a substitute for them. Gwyn’s ...”

“... of GDP on fixed investment than the United Kingdom: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. Belgium spent a smaller share of GDP on fixed income than the United Kingdom. Comparable figures for other OECD ...”

“... as the ninth Marquess of Queensberry lay dying in his magnificent house in town, Emile Zola in France lovingly dusted the medal he had received a fortnight earlier for his services in the Dreyfus affair, and thousands of miles away Mafeking awoke to its hundred-and-first day of siege.’ Almost any historical novel that happened to concern itself with the ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... École Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1872. The school was a direct response to the Commune, to France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, and to a sense that its ruling class was bereft of talent, industry and imagination, its imperial and cultural mission a shambles. The university now known as Sciences Po was established as a new ‘crossroads of ...”