“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”

“... profane – that confirmed his vocation. The first came when he was 11 years old, on vacation in France to visit his French father’s family. There was a vichyssoise on the Queen Mary. It was cold and it was good, and he remembered it. On arrival, his normal American patterns asserted themselves, and he reverted to steak haché, frites and ‘Coca’. The ...”

“... London, which demands such treatment (and has surely received it). Paris in its history dominated France much less than London dominated England. So we perhaps prefer to read about separate, key episodes which happened to take place in Paris. There is something dispiriting about the idea of slogging through from the day the first Roman banged his palisade ...”

“... do that, they’ll catch him.’ The narrator tells us later that before he went to France to fight he had ‘never shot at a bird or an animal in my life’ – so his first targets were humans. Sassoon’s attitude to blood sports, as to most other things, was not without its complexities. All I felt at that moment was extreme annoyance at the ...”

“... including anti-communist networks in Italy (Operation Gladio), Denmark (Operation Absalon) and France (the Allied Clandestine Committee), as well as in West Germany and the Netherlands. With arms caches in the countryside and support from European intelligence agencies, ‘stay-behind’ military and paramilitary units would be mobilised in the event of a ...”

“... that she was writing a novel and that it was about a young man’s adventures in the South of France, her mother had apparently said: ‘I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’ (‘Billi’ was what her family called the young Sybille.) ‘God forbid, mummy,’ Billi replied. But mummy was sure of her ground: ‘One ...”

“... that the two new republics, both of them imperilled by the great Catholic monarchies of Spain and France, should make common cause? Early in 1651 an English embassy to the Hague seemed likely to seal such an alliance. Yet the negotiations ended in acrimony, and the following year the two republics went to war. Since that war seems to make neither religious ...”

“... fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was completed. In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin ...”

“... Proust, and he counted it his first novel. He took to the life of a wandering reporter, visiting France and Russia, Poland, Albania and Germany for his papers, and writing them up in long series of articles. He drank, and cultivated a casual grand manner. To an accompanying hack he claimed to be writing for ‘posterity’, and when an angry wire from ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... Christ, but appears to have no doubt that many of the doctrines preached by the Catholic Church in France were either incredible or wicked or both. Rousseau was, in Emile as elsewhere, hard on the doctrine of Original Sin. It was his lifelong conviction that man came from the hands of God innocent and happy, and that society made him depraved and ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... monarchy’ – included, beyond the Iberian peninsula, Italy, the Netherlands, parts of southern France, the whole of America from California to Tierra del Fuego, the shores of West Africa, the Philippines, and regions of India and Japan. It was the most powerful and by far the richest empire the world had ever seen. ‘How strange a thing it is,’ one ...”

“... for Afro-Asian solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently independent African states – Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea – and gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and ...”

“... created a genuinely ‘national’ government just as the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. Churchill’s relations with the Tories were difficult, and for a moment he seemed to stand above party, with a cabinet that included the party leaders: Clement Attlee of Labour; Sir Archibald Sinclair of the Liberals; and Chamberlain himself, who was ...”