“... college all but certain. The Rassemblement National wouldn’t be the favourite to win the French presidential election next year. Perhaps an academic voting restriction would resolve the West’s political crisis.This proposal sounds absurd because an unrestricted franchise is now seen as a prerequisite of democracy. But it is worth considering how we ...”

“... trust their officers to carry out orders if they were asked to use firearms against ordinary French citizens. Was France on the verge of another revolution? The gilets jaunes invoked the revolution of 1789 time and again. Protesters wore the red Phrygian cap, sang the Marseillaise and staged mock guillotine executions of Macron. The rumoured hesitation ...”

“... Until then there had been several large volumes on Les Armées Révolutionnaires (written in French), a book of essays (also in French) and a collection of book reviews written anonymously for the TLS. Subsequently, he has become one of the most prolific historians writing in English: 11 books in 14 years, several ...”

“... Foot and Denis Healey will therefore have to fight the next election on a programme closer to the French Communist Party’s than to that of any other important working-class party in the Western world. Labour has been losing support since the early Fifties. The gap between its voters and its activists has been widening since the early Seventies. Between ...”

“... sank without trace. Then, in 1980, 43 school exercise books, laboriously written in self-taught French and studded with Breton words and turns of phrase, were produced miraculously intact by Déguignet’s descendants in response to a newspaper appeal by a local history project. From them, local historians derived a continuous narrative, and the resulting ...”

“... His fame rests on Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only French plays which his stage-struck century bequeathed to the international repertoire. But his achievement has been adulterated, for ‘Beaumarchais’ has long been the brand-name of a product variously reprocessed by Mozart, Rossini and the score or so ...”

“... There is a fable about the French past that goes as follows. Sometime in the 17th century, the country’s proud noble caste was humbled and tamed by imperious ministers and kings. Where once it had swayed the destinies of Europe, it was now confined to the gilded cage of the royal court, and the elegant salons of Paris ...”

“... appearance, wiping her hands on her apron, a link of impossibly bright hair slipping free of its French pleat. ‘Got some coffee?’ ‘Coffee? Yeah.’ ‘Got somethin’ to eat?’ You can see the strands of their lives pulling into a knot as soon as they get squiffy and put that slow-slow song with the aching sax on the nickelodeon, while she gives her ...”

“... In the autumn​ of 1730, a 20-year-old woman in the southern French port of Toulon claimed that her spiritual director, a middle-aged Jesuit, had repeatedly forced her to have sex with him. When she became pregnant, he made her drink a potion that induced an abortion. He denied everything and accused her of slander ...”

“... a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of ...”

“... birth of their only child, Anne, a few months later, he gave his occupation as ‘landowner and French baron’ while Myrtle signed herself ‘Myrtle Marion Ambrosene Darquier de Pellepoix, formerly Lindsay-Jones’. Subsequently, and not merely to misdirect creditors, Callil observes, she answered to Sandra Lyndsay-Darquier, Cynthia de Pelle Poix and ...”

“... effect in his portrait of the merchant-industrialist Ivan Morozov, the great collector of modern French and avant-garde art, shown with a recently acquired work by Matisse. This colourful tempera with heavy black outlining echoing a Post-Impressionist approach allows Serov to paint in a modern French idiom: he is exploring ...”

“... published The Duel in European History, a thoughtful account that drew mainly on British and French evidence from the Early Modern period and presented the modern duel as an aristocratic residue. Five years later, Friedhelm Guttandin offered a variant on the same theme. Incorporating much more German material, his book used the duel to argue that ...”

“... Le Dieu caché: les peintres du Grand Siècle et la vision de Dieu, a collection of 63 French 17th-century religious pictures which can be seen at the Villa Medici in Rome until 28 January, Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor challenge us to take theology as seriously as aesthetics. They also prove that it requires more than a sensitive eye and a ...”

“... year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have been eight when Chinatown appeared, and ten or so when David Bowie recorded the song that gives this book its title. Specktor’s mother was a screenwriter whose career was short-lived; later she was a drinker who snarled at her son for asking her to stop. By then she was divorced from his father, who was a leading ...”