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“... on, he notes approvingly that his hero Victor Serge shared a house with Breton in the South of France as they both fled the Nazis, explaining that the two writers were working together in the French section of the anti-Stalinist International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists. Hoberman’s provocative, entertaining and informative book veers ...”

“... of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus detectable in ...”

“... boundaries themselves help to stimulate national consciousness in the majority; Britain, France, Spain may all be examples of this. A fact brought out by Hodgkin is that the minorities were not always on bad terms with the Vietnamese people, but repeatedly took part with them in risings against oppressive governments – as subject tribes in the ...”

“... of three referendums which challenged the grand designs of Brussels have been ignored – in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Greece in 2015 – and three have led to a second vote: Denmark in 1993; Ireland in 2002 and 2009.) Mediapart likes to stress the undemocratic nature of the EU: ‘stolen from its citizens’ by ‘the markets’, ‘finance ...”

“... rising in Polish Ukraine and a devastating Swedish invasion known as the Deluge. To the east, Peter the Great was transforming old Muscovy into an expanding Russian empire, concluding that the Commonwealth was blocking its way into Europe. It was Peter, backed by the ambitious Prussian kings, who founded the policy of ...”

“... as the Nihonjinron, literally the ‘theory of Japaneseness’. Nihonjinron is the subject of Peter Dale’s book, the style of which is marred somewhat by his own almost Nihonjinronish fondness for psycho-socio-anthropological jargon. He has interesting things to say, however. The intellectual quest for the essence of Japaneseness is a huge industry in ...”

“... At the end of Out of this World the main character recalls his first trip abroad, on a visit to France to mark the tenth anniversary of the Armistice in 1918. Flying home, he felt that he was being lifted ‘out of the age of mud ... into the age of air’. This childhood memory is being recalled in 1982, at the time of the Falklands War, and it seems quite ...”

“... have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of ...”

“... of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the moment when they were written, whether from Victorian and Edwardian confidence in robust parliamentary government, or from post-imperial decline, or the ...”

“... needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) locates its perfect society in ‘spacious vales and lofty mountains, pleasant verdure and groves of stately trees’. This particular utopia smells good, whereas most of them are odourless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and ...”

“... it seemed that Tsipras’s strategy of dividing Europe – and even breaking the link between France and Germany – had worked. Yet during the night of the summit, as one EU insider reported, Merkel and Hollande ‘crucified’ Tsipras. No matter what he conceded, they, playing good cop/bad cop, responded that it was not enough to rebuild ...”

“... is no trace of her residence in England in the early 1860s, and Dickens may have installed her in France to bear a child or children unseen. A servant, however, testified in later life that the relationship between the couple had been entirely innocent. The constructions which have been put on the evidence vary. Katharine Longley – on whose research Claire ...”

“... Benzo of Alba and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, we might be tempted to think that the history of France and Germany a millennium ago can offer us nothing more than the dreary spectacle of one barbarian succeeding another on the banks of the Seine or the Rhine. Even the fame of the great figures of the period makes them less than real to us, turning them into ...”

“... Blanford, one of them supposedly the other’s creation, and both a curious blend of Oscar Wilde, Peter Pan and l’homme moyen sensuel. The mist of uncertain identity which shrouds Sutcliffe and Blanford radiates out to the other members of the charmed circle. Monsieur, like Justine at the commencement of the ‘Alexandria Quartet’, must now be regarded as ...”

“... in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection. Goldsmith is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his brother, Teddy. Sam White, the Paris columnist of the Evening Standard, and a long-standing friend of Goldsmith, suggested to Richard Ingrams, as the heat died down, that the ‘services’ mistake was really a ...”