“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Never Again War!, which Kollwitz produced for the tenth anniversary of the declaration of war on France (it commemorates her son too). Both Black Anna and the protester rise up with extended hands, seizing the moment: Kollwitz turns a bourgeois affirmation of liberty into a peasant summoning others to battle in the first instance and, in the second, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”