“... million to HTB through the Sequoia Trust, a charity he runs with his wife, Sabina de Balkany, a French-Hungarian antiques dealer, and his son, Winston. Marshall has also provided funding for St Mellitus College, an offshoot of HTB, which now trains nearly a quarter of Anglican ordinands. The first principal of St Mellitus, Graham Tomlin, met Marshall at ...”

“... and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of Collaborators (even ...”

“... immediately, despite Chamberlain’s frantic attempts to hang on, the age of Churchill began. David Faber, an Old Etonian and, like Leo and Julian Amery, a former Tory MP, has had the good idea of writing the story of the father and his two sons. Julian was appointed minister of aviation by his father-in-law, Macmillan, and could claim to be the man ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... protons raced around the LHC’s huge ring, 27 kilometres in circumference. They criss-crossed the French-Swiss border more than ten thousand times a second before smashing into each other, releasing primordial fireworks. Huddled with my colleagues around a laptop, watching the LHC come online was a thrilling moment, but also, for many of us, a rueful ...”

“... massive dissent and disapproval. There was no million-person march at the time of the American or French wars in the late 18th century, although there was a lot of dissent among the elites and presumably, though less widely recorded, among others. What there was, according to Favret, was the poet William Cowper, publishing The Task in 1785 in the aftermath of ...”

“... precocious. Bored at school, he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the idea of heroic ...”

“... than the desire to explore the situations and character dispositions that make laughter happen. French and Saunders, whose range, from shared flat to Hollywood burlesque, owes much to Eric and Ernie, are to some extent an exception. Others, like Reeves and Mortimer, who are the inheritors of the spirit, if not the style, of Morecambe and Wise carry the ...”

“... to the original 13 colonies. The Revolutionary War, followed by the upheavals attendant on the French Revolution, largely suppressed European immigration for a generation or more, and the United States Congress prohibited the further importation of African slaves after 1808. Then following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, European migrants once again lifted ...”

“... also immensely productive for European (though not for British) cinema; the films Kafka saw were French, German, Italian and Danish. Some film historians argue that prewar European cinema, with its reliance on long takes and staging in depth, should be understood as an alternative to Hollywood’s increasingly rapid-fire cut-and-paste. It would be nice to ...”

“... be unique to this country, although the historian Mary Jo Maynes has identified a smaller group of French and German autobiographies. It is striking, therefore, that contributors to the first wave of ‘history from below’, including E.P. Thompson, used working-class memoirs so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon ...”

“... first. But then he always won. The little wooden men under my command could be English, Dutch or French: it made no difference; not one of them ever escaped from Colditz. This was staggeringly frustrating, but I can draw retrospective consolation from knowing that we were unwittingly recapitulating a more authentic version of Colditz – one in which escape ...”

“... of his outstanding Modernity and Self-Identity’. Foucault, ‘shrouded in a special removable French cloak and with a built-in thoughtful head movement’, ‘waves his baton in post-structuralist style at all challenges’. Anyone who wishes to buy a figure can send off $14.99, quoting the relevant catalogue number (THEOR-01-69-GID or ...”

“... a supply of American blood. On a visit to Britain in the 1950s, de Gaulle brought a few bottles of French blood with him, so as not to be contaminated with inferior cross-channel plasma if he required a tranfusion. Macmillan didn’t have a refrigerator, so the blood was stored in the squash court. No such problem for Bush: his spare blood is in the fridge in ...”