“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... voice rang out: ‘You finally did it. Good on you, you old poof!’)At his subsequent wedding to David Furnish, Elton wasas happy as I could ever remember being. And that was when my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath … As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 2003 for violating the agreement. The story gets more complicated. Since October 2003, the EU3 (France, Germany and Britain) have tried to negotiate a deal with Iran whereby it would voluntarily suspend its enrichment activities in return for regional security guarantees and help with nuclear technology. Iran was persuaded to sign the Additional ...”

“... artist and has found inconsequentialities to photograph well away from Tennessee in Cuba, Russia, France, Japan and the rest of the USA. In 1976 it was the colour that set him apart. Photographers who rejected the last echoes of painting’s conventions of composition and subject matter already had a standing when Eggleston’s MoMA exhibition took place. In ...”

“... never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague David Scherman (who took the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub) later remembered that ‘you named a disease and Lee would imagine she had it in no time at all.’ Regina Lisso, Town Hall, Leipzig (1945) by Lee Miller. Lee Miller ...”

“... work, called Jericho, matches towers he has erected in his 35-acre open-air studio in the South of France. Each of the storeys is a roughly three-metre cube, made from reinforced concrete casts of the corner of a freight container. A door is cut out on each side of each cube: if you step in on the ground floor you can look up, through round, bashed-out ...”

“... young man: these became Baldwin’s needs as they had been Joyce’s. What he mainly learned in France, he later said, ‘was about my own country, my own past, and about my own language. Joyce accepted silence, exile and cunning as a system which would sustain his life, and I’ve had to accept it too – incidentally, silence is the hardest part to ...”