“... Olympism,​ the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city ...”

“... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles deGaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the ...”

“... not been revealed, it was widely known that Roosevelt had been a friend to Vichy and an enemy to de Gaulle, that he had hoped to establish some sort of American provisional government in France, which would issue its own currency. He had treated France not as an ally but as a vassal. The American commander responsible for the Paris region had even tried ...”

“... non-form.) More practically, I bought Paris à pied – published by the Fédération Française de la Randonnée Pédestre – after discovering from a browse that there is a red and yellow waymarked path running west-east across Paris, that the GR1 crossed the Bois de Boulogne and the GR14 and 14A the Bois ...”

“... political rage. Can passion be stronger than power? Do we want it to be? Imagine now the Palais de Justice in Paris in February 1898. Emile Zola has been charged with libelling the army in his famous letter, which we know today under the title ‘J’accuse’ (it was a stroke of genius of the editor of L’Aurore, the left-wing paper in which it ...”

“... will never end in success. And yet Blair has been known to speak admiringly of the way in which De Gaulle extricated France from Algeria, overcoming the ferocious resistance of the Army, Air Force, more than a million French settlers and many other elements of the French establishment. It is worth recalling that ...”

“... not want the Resisters, however brave, getting in the way of post-war conservative governments; De Gaulle and the Poles appeared to him to be obsessed with, respectively, personal status and frontiers. Stalin had a visceral distrust of peasant insurrection, whether it occurred in Yenan or Yugoslavia. Roosevelt believed in big battalions and in ...”

“... young Lord Stafford and Lady G. were eventually acted out in full view of the tabloids by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. James knew a dramatic subject. In some contemporary writing about lone, long-suffering and much-photographed female celebrities who have haunted our dreams, there is an attempt to compare them to figures from Greek tragedy. In ...”

“... of running dry. Even so, the simultaneous appearance of two studies of Louis from Les Editions de Minuit is a little surprising: did the right hand know what the left hand was publishing? What is more, both books are concerned with the King’s public image, rather than his policies or his private life. One book deals with court festivals, the other with ...”

“... new Iraqi Army, the country’s backbone implant, come from? Garner has two obvious options: to de-Baathify the civil and military infrastructure, as the Allies did in Germany after 1945; or to rely on the old structure. Both courses leave the occupation and whatever order it imposes vulnerable to attack from within. Iraq’s new army, like that of its ...”

“... A route-map of the demonstration was published which showed that it would lead past the Hôtel de Ville (which houses the mairie of Paris); then, just before the march began, the route was altered so as to bypass the Hôtel de Ville. The point which the PCF was (rightly) sure would not be lost on the governing élite ...”

“... face. (After the war Painlevé spotted a resemblance and retitled the picture: Lobster Claw or de Gaulle.) The danger of seeing too much in such images is never far away, and Painlevé runs towards it: ‘The most preposterous anthropomorphism reigns in this field.’ His scientific and artistic ambitions are most involuted in L’Hippocampe (The ...”

“... demanding the incorporation into the Reich of Belgium and the French departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, plus the Don Basin and the Caucasus. What he had his eye on were the iron ores of Longwy-Briey, the Belgian coalfields, the iron of the Don Basin and the manganese deposits of the Caucasus, among much else. Bethmann-Hollweg agreed with almost every ...”

“... this to keep enough wits about them to worry about the parts. Before Coco Chanel, as Edmonde Charles-Roux writes in her 1975 biography, women (and men) who wore perfume were generally forced to choose between various floral concoctions – heliotrope, gardenia, violets – none of which lasted well. ‘Therefore you had to be overperfumed at the ...”

“... After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry ...”