“... poems, plays, political texts – are widely translated and read around the world. He was given a French state funeral and a plaque in the Panthéon. Streets and schools and stations are named after him in Martinique and mainland France. But he isn’t required reading in most French schools, and his plays are rarely ...”

“... of Kipling as a Sahib generates in the narrative the stylistic markers of cultural difference: the French idiom, the inverted commas, the simile, the dapper acknowledgement of trespass, the expansive double-edged irony of ‘modern civilisation’. Kipling discovers himself and India in relation to English (or European) purposes and standards. He discovers ...”

“... were wholly welcome in the field; and much later, long after she had distinguished herself as a French Surrealist icon and a British war correspondent, her name could sometimes be confused with Lee Friedlander’s, even though he was a very different artist with a long-term, stable fame. Lee Miller’s fame kept growing, but it was unstable, even too ...”

“... had an occupant. A small, gaunt, elderly man in a jacket and open-necked shirt stood in the French window. I think I remember a look of something like panic on his face as the gaggle of 19-year-olds approached. After a brief hesitation he turned and exited rapidly through the glass doors into the garden. I watched as he walked away from the ...”

“... Spurs had a vacancy when they did – a vacancy created by the resignation of Tel’s predecessor, David Pleat. Pleat had been fingered by the Sun as a kerb-crawler and there was much bar-room speculation at the time about tip-offs, fit-ups, Sun stringers on the Met. The first Sun revelations came in July 1987, and Pleat survived these. The second round came ...”

“... at least five languages, so she is attuned to the polyglot Strindberg, who taught himself German, French, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew, even writing books in French. Prideaux is also an accomplished novelist, and the prize-winning biographer of Strindberg’s friend Edvard Munch. Any biographer of Strindberg has to assess ...”

“... form of ‘existential Jewishness’. In May 1968, when the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit – French-born but the son of German refugees – was sentenced by the government to deportation, the rallying cry along the Paris barricades was: ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’ To the protesters, ‘German Jew’ represented a collective identity ...”

“... destroyed the systems of Imperial Germany and pre-Fascist Italy, and which crippled that of the French Third Republic. As in Germany, Italy and France, the crisis began to make itself felt before the First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be ...”

“... this stricture to gentile wine, perhaps holding some secret suspicions regarding the prayers of French vintners. But in Rabbi Loew’s day the religious authorities made a distinction between ordinary wine (and bread) and that used for ritual purposes, permitting Jewish consumption of the former, especially in Moravia and in Poland near the Hungarian border ...”

“... valuable section of the book is the script itself. A pity its printing is small and spidery, and French, German and English versions run down each page in narrow, competitive columns. I would have thought a running counterpoint between dialogue and visuals (text and freeze-frames are firmly segregated) would have made for a much more stimulating book. The ...”

“... to take care of itself.We don’t know yet whether the British government will have to follow the French, who had to follow the Spanish, who had to follow the Italians, down the road to a total shutdown of major cities. Libertarians inside the government will resist. But if and when that resistance becomes futile and the army is called on to patrol the ...”

“... there was no longer a viable balance of power in Europe. Interventionists warned that if the French or British fleet fell into Hitler’s hands the Atlantic would become a German lake. Roosevelt talked of the new age of air-power. What if the Nazis established themselves in Fascist states in South America, within a few hours’ bombing time of Washington ...”

“... within the country, limiting itself to tendentious reports of ‘Amnesty in Guatemala’, ‘French Socialists lose election’ and the like: religion remains one of the few areas where the rival mouthpieces can confront each other directly, and they join battle with gusto. More significant are the Hierarchy’s attempts, many of them successful, to ...”

“... some of the best examples of ‘microhistory’ or ‘the new narrative’. This, pioneered in French by Le Roi Ladurie (Montaillou, 1975), and in English by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”