“... 66, after addressing a committee of the Economic Community in Brussels. But he was not a typical French mandarin. He was Russian by birth and went on to study philosophy and religion in Germany in the 1920s, without bothering to take a degree. He then moved to Paris, but never attended a French university, let alone one of ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with Welsh forces, headed for and captured Carmarthen. It then marched through South Wales into Herefordshire and the Midlands, halting only at Woodbury Hill – so the story goes – a bare eight miles from ...”

“... the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s work, though I gather he’s big in the US thesis market. Yet the ICA devoted three evenings in ...”

“... them. No page is without these supports, cited in whatever language the source employed, Latin, French, German and occasionally English. They are a shade discursive at times, to show how much the author likes doing them, but nothing is dodged or shirked. Not surprisingly, publication of this book is simultaneous in the USA and Britain, while ...”

“... engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical ...”

“... This will be a happy year if everyone who owns a Rabelais gives it a good read. The French have made 1984 ‘L’ Année Rabelais’, treating it as the 500th anniversary of his birth. Glasgow (which has one of the world’s best collections of Gargantua and Pantagruel) got in early, celebrating it last year. But 1983 was Luther year ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... look the king in the face till he had revenged their friend; a year on, he launched an attack on French galleys, and was drowned. Two of the men closest to Henry had perished in a war that achieved very little in any permanent sense. Henry Guildford’s power lasted until 1532 when, tired of the Boleyns, he handed Henry his resignation from the post of ...”

“... this retreat primarily in ‘the social tendencies and aspirations’ that found expression in the French Revolution. The new social order demanded clothing that would diminish rather than emphasise differences of rank and status. Men therefore turned to a form of dress which was characterised, first, by its uniformity and, second, by its simplicity and ...”

“... writes in his dramatisation of the visit, ‘to immortalise this great moment in the history of French intellectuals.’ In his first novel, HHhH (2010), which tells the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Binet says that inventing a character in order to illuminate historical material is like ‘planting false proof at a crime scene where the ...”

“... and unpredictable. In his erudite study, Avner Ben-Amos has three cracks at analysing the way French society from the Revolution to the present has tried to come to terms with its most illustrious bodies. First, he considers the longue durée of political regimes: how the liberal and then the radical Revolution, the Thermidorian reaction and Napoleon, the ...”

“... 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688’. There were also plenty of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by ...”

“... him to Uganda when he was four. At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding the French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he’d just returned to his hotel near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée when the French police called him in for interrogation. They were inquiring into a ...”