“... sought to operate as a determinedly assimilationist nation state in the way post-Revolutionary France often tried to do. This does not mean the UK can be regarded merely as a multinational state, or (pace some post-colonialist commentators) as an English-constructed empire. Instead, the UK has most closely resembled what the Columbia political scientist ...”

“... famous phrase in a letter Thorpe once sent to Scott announcing: ‘Bunnies can (and will) go to France.’ By, in effect, disregarding the great drama of his life-story Thorpe has succeeded merely in short-changing himself. The more one reflects on those bizarre events – originating with the shooting of a dog by a hit-man on Exmoor over twenty years ago ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... won the Prix Renaudot in 2010, the same year Houellebecq won the Goncourt, and was celebrated in France as another instance of an enfant terrible growing up. Virginie Despentes was born in 1969 and grew up in Nancy, in north-east France. In King Kong Theory, a short half-memoir half-essay published in ...”

“... They had an important common interest in preventing the domination of the Continent by France or Germany. Beyond that, they had distinct spheres of influence where neither was very interested in supporting the other. As a result, their occasional negotiations over forming an alliance were liable to be affected by misunderstandings. They preferred ...”

“... he argued, treats experience as a congeries of isolated impressions, of the kind once proposed by David Hume.) The praise was sincere, and generous too: a leader of Parisian opinion was offering a leg-up to a young provincial who might easily become his rival. And Camus needed all the help he could get: his paper had folded in 1940, forcing him to seek work ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol. Throughout Ottoman lands, where they had for centuries exercised considerable influence, consular staff from the Allied states departed ...”

“... OZ included an interview with the thirty-something poet, Jean-Jacques Lebel, apparently in jail in France at the time. Fifteen pages of educational material followed under the heading Agit-OZ, including a genealogy of world revolution that beginners could pull out and pin on the wall. It starts with Cromwell and the Diggers (heroes for back-to-the-earth ...”

“... mere political diversion’, a front for stirring up troubles like Britain’s in Kenya and France’s in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of the white man’ on behalf of Cairo or Moscow: a cynical strategy, the governor muses, since under any revolutionary regime ‘the elephants would be the first to ...”

“... obituary in Le Monde was unequivocal: the death of Alexandre Kojève on 4 June 1968 had deprived France of one of its greatest civil servants. Kojève had worked at the Ministry of Economy and Finance for more than twenty years, overseeing Marshall Aid, nurturing the European Economic Community and brokering the Kennedy round of tariff agreements, and he ...”

“... she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says that ‘everything is effable’ – but it does recognise mystery when it has to, and it once allowed us, Diski says, ‘a neat phrase’ for ‘the mist in our minds’: ‘I know not what.’ The phrase ‘works fine in ...”

“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... they were two and a half years ago. Some of the Mirage III Super-Etendards have been sent back to France for resale, in exchange for Nesher Mirage Vs adapted by the Israelis. Since these were battle-tested in the Lebanon, there are few more practical ultra-modern weapons available on earth. Our French friends at the Elysée can wring their hands and protest ...”