“... the religious poem composed by Marguerite d’Angoulême, the favourite sister of the King of France, which was her 1545 New Year’s gift for Catherine Parr (she was not yet 13!), and which Starkey calls ‘impressive’; and, a year later, her New Year’s gift for her father, her version of Catherine’s own Prayers and Meditations, rendered into ...”

“... brother Joe; awareness of his father’s infidelities and sympathy for him in his quarrels with Rose Kennedy, Jack’s mother; stories about his Fitzgerald grandfather; his mother’s coldness (this gets close to psychobabble); and the general appeal of taking risks. ‘Like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class’, Dallek writes, he ...”

“... explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001 I was able to drive – nervously but safely – from Kabul to Kandahar, but when I tried to make the same journey in 2011 I could go no ...”

“... meanwhile been driven between them by the Dreyfus Affair, which did the same to friends throughout France. While J’Accuse, Zola’s indictment of the military conspirators who framed Dreyfus, became the rallying cry of the Dreyfusard movement, ‘Cézanne,’ Danchev writes, ‘had nothing to say about the affaire, which he observed as from a distance.’ He ...”

“... disparagingly put it. Born in New Zealand, she spent all her time in London and Germany and France just getting by, struggling with lack of money and poor health, writing in beds and bedsits, out of suitcases and in overnight hotels and all the time imagining a kind of writing that didn’t yet exist. And where everyone else in the new modernist age had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... broken up at the end of the First World War, its constituent parts redistributed among Britain, France, Belgium, Australia and South Africa. Small in surface area compared to the British, ephemeral in duration, the former empire still attracted attention in the interwar years, when colonial propagandists lobbied to get it back, but even the Nazis paid it ...”

“... United States,’ his travelling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, added, ‘as glory is the god of France . . . If one is born to think, he thinks; if he is born to make money, he does not think.’ Vidal puts the same point just as sharply, reflecting that the United States never developed ‘a true civilisation’: ‘cellophane and Kleenex were never quite ...”

“... gravel of Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, where early in the 20th century Lebanese patriots rose up against the Ottoman Empire and were slaughtered. The statue in the square commemorating their deaths is pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war. There is a carnival atmosphere of the kind that often accompanies collective political ...”

“... way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this ...”

“... developed to attack them, varied; and those programmes weren’t necessarily ‘progressive’. France was slow to develop comprehensive unemployment insurance but was a pioneer in addressing the costs of children’s dependence; Nazi Germany showered benefits on families, but only when they promoted the regime’s racial imperatives. Welfare policies meet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sentenced to death. He escaped, possibly killing his guard, fled to Belgrade, Beirut and finally France, where he joined the Foreign Legion, was wounded and captured before escaping again and moving on to Britain to avoid the advancing Nazi forces.His decision to join the British army led to two noteworthy incidents. First, with reckless courage, he stormed ...”

“... and Erich Fromm, some well into the 1960s. By that time, however, structuralism was dominant in France and, despite the friendship Lévi-Strauss and Breton forged in New York, it was no ally to Surrealism. Poststructuralism was even less so. Yet Surrealist traces persist even there. Although Lacan reread Freud through structural linguistics, he was formed ...”

“... his father’s pacifism and spent the later part of the First World War as an orderly in northern France. After the war he studied architecture in London and then took a job as a clerk of works at the Plaza Paramount in Piccadilly, which had ornate Renaissance-style plasterwork and a Wurlitzer organ. The Plaza opened in 1926, the year before The Jazz ...”