“... a letter Proust wrote in 1903, at the height of an anti-clerical wave which was sweeping through France: I can tell you that at Illiers, the small community where two days ago my father presided at the awarding of the school prizes, the curé is no longer invited to the distribution of the prizes … The pupils are trained to consider the people who ...”

“... events to be understood? Jean-Pierre Filiu, who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris after a career in France’s diplomatic corps which included tours of duty in Jordan, Syria and Tunisia, argues in his new book, From Deep State to Islamic State, that the Arab revolutions (as he calls them) have been foiled – Tunisia apart – by successful counter-revolutions ...”

“... the greatest resistance has been displayed’. By that point it was already clear that it was in France, the country of Mesmer, Bernheim, Charcot, Bergson and Janet, France with its long literary tradition of exquisite sensitivity to the psychological, that resistance to psychoanalysis was greatest. ‘In Paris ...”

“... theatrical relic. The last thing we all saw her in was L’Aiglon, in which with great dignity she rose on one remaining limb from her chair and, holding herself firm with one hand, swung her arm into the theatrical air to salute France as Rostand’s young leader who never led or ruled. She always had a bleating ...”

“... he holds a small scroll (a love poem?) while the other, resting between his thighs, toys with a rose. This is a Shakespeare fit to have his poems set as lieder. He is also celebrated as a central figure in German Kunst on the proscenium arch of the Latvian national opera house in Riga, once the city’s German-speaking theatre, where four portrait profiles ...”

“... those days. Rich families vied for the papacy; loyalties inclined to this or that superpower, to France or to Spain; momentarily, the people of Naples rose against Spain and were suppressed; every two or three decades, a plague would descend. The economy was an ox-cart stuck on a muddy road, with most cities’ populations ...”

“... of Governor-General Francis Harrison (1913-21), the proportion of Filipino officials rose from 50 to 90 per cent, and the total number of all officials from roughly five and a half to 14 thousand. The oligarchy inherited no solid bureaucratic traditions from the Spanish period, had no interest in this civil service except as a source of ...”

“... the Sunni majority. Four years after Syria gained independence, Hafez joined the air force and rose quickly up the ranks. After the Ba’athist military coup of 1963 he became increasingly powerful, as head of the air force and then minister of defence. In 1970, he staged a bloodless coup from within the ruling military committee, which he called the ...”

“... coteries of addicts. Plenty of others were on the trail in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in France. They included Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re ...”

“... based on fleeting shared interests, and fighting against enemies from their own faiths.Rodrigo rose to prominence as an uncommonly skilled warrior in the court of Sancho II of Castile, where he was head of the king’s personal retinue. After Sancho’s sudden death, he entered the service of the late king’s brother Alfonso VI, ruler of the now enlarged ...”

“... This is a situation without parallel in any other European state. In different ways, unions in France, Germany and Italy carry a good deal more clout than they do in the UK – even though in France, for example, a much smaller percentage of workers belong to them. Yet the way people work is changing more radically than ...”

“... country to assay stocks held by merchants, to audit their books, and to seize tea smuggled from France, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands into unguarded ports, especially in Scotland and the north-east of England. Tax was being illegally avoided by smuggling tea into Boston, Lincolnshire, many years before legally taxed tea was dumped into the harbour of ...”

“... Pless wrote that she ‘had relatives and dear friends in England, Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, Spain, Russia, Sweden … How well these best elements of the fighting nations knew each other and despite this they had to continue killing each other.’ She was obliged to declare her allegiance to Germany, her husband’s country. Aristocratic men ...”

“... to London. The next day, confident conditions were improving, he set off again. The snow in France was thick and he didn’t reach Geneva until Christmas Eve. He then took a diligence to Sallanches, at the bottom of the track up to Chamonix, arriving at sunset to find, to his great surprise, that there was no sledge available for the formidable ...”

“... props and costumes are always magically available. Claude Arnaud’s biography, first published in France more than ten years ago and now translated into English, describes a life that travels the distance from Proust to Bardot, not just chronologically but culturally, from Gallimard to the silver screen. The more time you spend with Cocteau the more Cocteaux ...”