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“... the century there were Whigs willing to cast envious eyes at the reforming energy of Louis XIV of France, just as a subsequent generation would reveal a sneaking admiration for Napoleon. Goldie remarks of Andrew Marvell, who had welcomed Cromwell as a Machiavellian ruler, that under Charles II he ‘did not wish to unking his prince: he wanted him to be ...”

“... gulf’, learning firsthand how wrong they had been in their imaginings of what awaited them in France. Although Fussell was indulgent of those younger-brother writers of the Twenties and Thirties who eased their war-complexes by engaging in ‘adversary playfulness’ or by filling their works with images of disjunction and collapse, it was evident ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... fought over territories of the past half-century. The war for Vietnam’s independence from France ended in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Then came the war with the US, which reached its height after the commitment of American ground troops in 1965 and ended in the capture of the South by Communist forces in 1975. Yet this postcolonial history, and the ...”

“... general and composed of independent units – one for each occupied country except France, which had two, one for de Gaulle’s Free French and another for those loyal to Giraud – each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... and others to eliminate it from education. Such attempts have been made – most recently in France – and any ammunition for the resisters is welcome. The problem about this kind of history, as Samuel recognises when considering its uneasy relations with Marxism, is that it sacrifices analysis and explanation to celebration and identification. It ...”

“... both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood home at La Devinière. (It still can.) His wars are like children’s games: he delighted in games, while seeing most of them as ...”

“... designed first to pre-empt a marriage that would strengthen Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France and second to neutralise the north while Henry’s war against France was prosecuted. In the event, his military campaign failed, though it’s possible that he did succeed in laying some foundations during the wars of ...”

“... turtledoves, bullfinches, owls, Thomas Moore’s ‘Thee, Thee, Only Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George ...”

“... a word of English origin referring to a kind of writing commonly practised in England but rare in France. Buckley is more interested in the ‘subjective impulse’ as a cultural phenomenon, reflecting a great increase in self-consciousness in society, than in autobiography as a distinctive literary form. He therefore casts his net widely, taking in ...”

“... his to her. In his last year of life, he paid a moving tribute to her to his old American friend David Bruce. He was a doomed man. In spite of his enormous youthful popularity, he was ill-fitted to be a King or President or Head of State of any kind. His inner confidence was early and fatally corroded by ceaseless bullying from his martinet father, George ...”

“... anthropologists to emphasise the existence of common ground between their two disciplines. In France this has been especially marked among historians such as Le Roy Ladurie who are associated with the periodical Annales. The response from the social anthropologists has been patchy; there has been much programmatic talk about the relevance of history for ...”

“... place on Good Friday. The new vegetable soon acquired a good deal of old folklore. At Epinal, in France: ‘The woman who carries home the last sheaf, or the last basket of potatoes, is known throughout the year as the “corn” or “potato dog”.’ It must be the relative newness of the potato that makes the ‘potato dog’ seem a little ...”

“... provenance and political correctness. Which also explains why Ismail Kadare is big in Italy and France (where he has lived in semi-self-imposed exile since 1990. The blurb says that he now divides his time between Paris and Tirana). Besides, it is unfair to judge his work in double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from ...”