“... the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from the Republican primaries, but the freakshow anticipated the Trump campaign to come. In Italy the ousting of ...”

“... in a liberal democracy can nowadays come up to the mark. De Gaulle is a colossus next to Nicolas Sarkozy, whose hands-on ‘hyper-presidency’ exploits so much of the executive power De Gaulle put in place, to so little effect. And Berlusconi? Cameron? Bush-and-Blair? Klaus Tschütscher of Liechtenstein? ‘Charles de Gaulle,’ Fenby ...”

“... When he gathered the members of the G20 for an emergency meeting in London in April 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy complained that the global economy was still in meltdown and ‘none of us has a plan.’ ‘Gordon has a plan,’ Obama chipped in helpfully. The rest of them followed it, not because Brown reasoned them round, but because by this point they ...”

“... of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Ken Livingstone was mayor of London, MySpace was the biggest social network, and the central bank interest rate in the UK was 5.5 per cent. It is ...”

“... World Cup, the French squad downed boots at the decision of the FFF to expel the Black striker Nicolas Anelka for disciplinary reasons. Domestic denunciation of the players was distinctly racialised, their indiscipline associated with the problem of the immigrant banlieues from which so many had emerged; ...”

“... 2007, the year My Heart Hemmed In came out in France, NDiaye left Paris and moved to Berlin. Nicolas Sarkozy’s election earlier that year had made France intolerable. One of his first foreign visits had been to Senegal, where he gave a speech at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. ‘The tragedy of Africa is that it has not fully entered ...”

“... to speak of a French decline since the mid-1970s. But the current sense of the term, that of Nicolas Baverez and others, which has given rise to le déclinisme, is to be avoided. It is too narrowly focused on economic and social performance, understood as a test of competition. Postwar history has shown how easily relative positions in these can ...”

“... read the resolution had already been made clear by the stentorian rhetoric of Cameron and Hague, Sarkozy and Juppé, and Obama and Clinton in advance of the Security Council vote. Since the issue was defined from the outset as protecting civilians from Gaddafi’s murderous onslaught ‘on his own people’, it followed that effective protection required the ...”

“... somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, stands accused by convergent witnesses of receiving some $20 million from Gaddafi for the electoral campaign that took him to the presidency. Christine Lagarde, his finance minister, who now heads the IMF, is under interrogation ...”