“... 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 ...”

“... Sir John Hawkwood infested Europe in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War. Whenever England and France patched up a peace, the mercenaries suddenly found themselves without pay and with nothing to do. No wonder everyone, from the Pope down, breathed a sigh of relief when they were invited to go off and deploy their skills in North Africa or Eastern ...”

“... with aberration and divergence. In his brave and inventive reconstruction, Wild Diversions (1972), David Thomson found a good image for it: ‘He did not live in the conventional order from day to day, but grew strong or weak like the wind.’ Obviously this has something to do with the vacillations of his physical health – Arthur Cash brings this out ...”

“... visiting philosopher in the US: his ideas are discussed by the authors of the essays assembled by David Hoy in Foucault: A Critical Reader. The French Foucault and the American Foucault are not two sides of one and the same thinker: they are philosophers who hold entirely incompatible doctrines. People have for a long time wondered whether Foucault ...”

“... these to other major industrial nations. Hindsight may suggest that it was folly for Britain and France to have been tempted down the road, but that wisdom was just as far from those in the seats of power then as it seems to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, ...”

“... quite happy and prosperous.’ Eventually, he took a commission in the Royal Artillery and went to France in May 1916, serving as a Forward Observation Officer. However, in August the ankle began to cause trouble and nine months later he was back in London for an operation; it transpired that it had never properly set. Once healed, Mallory returned to his ...”

“... prime piece of property. At the age of two she was already signed up for a marriage to the king of France’s son; at four, diplomacy changed, and she was down to marry her cousin Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who at the time was 20 years old. Unlikely as it would seem in 1521, this was one of the most important relationships in Mary’s life, though she ...”

“... exclamations’ and ‘pampered sensibility’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) would find favour with ‘the Ladies’. Her habit, in the second Vindication, of condemning female characteristics and behaviour as slavish, ignorant, mad, corrupt and infectious is even more startling. ‘After surveying the history of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... such as André Siegfried showed the profound historical continuity of voting patterns in France: for example, a Département hostile to the Revolution in 1789 would be likely to support a candidate of the Right a hundred and fifty years later; while a Département sympathetic to the Revolution would be found supporting the Popular Front in 1936. Even ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... end of a spectrum of judicial interventionism. What cannot be said, as he then suggests, is that France stands at the other. France, Sumption asserts, was ‘the first country in the world to develop a coherent scheme of public or administrative law’; yet, he says, ‘successive French constitutions from 1799 to 1958 ...”

“... with their first league title for 50 years. Barclay talks to a number of other coaches, including David Moyes of Everton, who originally believed that Mourinho had made himself a hostage to fortune by his blind faith in his ability to shape his own destiny: ‘The initial feeling was that you just couldn’t display that kind of arrogance in this country and ...”