“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... could be expedited if she and Helmut simply got a room. Thatcher’s problems were all with the French. As leader of the opposition she had had a bad experience at a briefing with the director of the IMF, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, ‘a languid, cigarette-smoking French intellectual of the type she had probably never ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two other biographies in English already exist: Iain Hamilton’s Koestler: A Biography (1982) and David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). But Scammell has little time for either work. His bibliography dismisses Hamilton’s book as ‘superficial and ill-researched’, and Cesarani’s (the one which attacked Koestler as a serial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he arrives, and he learns to his horror that his mother died in the workhouse. The narrator in David Plante’s The Foreigner is a peeping Tom – twice in the book he experiences orgasm while watching or listening to other people making love – and he tells his story in a detached, remote style which at moments has echoes of Bainbridge’s accomplished ...”