“... the famous would drop in rather than with the famous themselves. Perhaps a historian will some day work out when exactly the noise of the traffic made conversation impossible in the cafés. Not long after the Liberation, the historian Pierre Renouvin, when he received at his home in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, used to say that neither he nor his wife were ...”

“... they had preserved the original laws of their ancestors, even while making changes in their own day. Their confidence in the eternal law was partly due to the lack of any written record to challenge it. But it was also due to the intellectual sifting of judicial decisions from case to case through the centuries. Basic principles were distinguished, the aim ...”

“... a toilet on the other side of a small partition. The idea of what it might be like to be here all day and night, cooped up with another person, was fully palpable.The jail was temporarily open to the public, courtesy of Artangel, an organisation that promotes the showing of art in odd and unexpected places. I had agreed to be locked in Oscar Wilde’s ...”

“... him (for reasons that Charles Penwarden does not explain), so that there was no shooting on that day. But it was in an atmosphere of suspicion, accusation and family hysteria that the local gendarmerie began their investigation. The outline of the case is fairly simple, although the details lead one into a mass of complexity. The 15-year-old ...”

“... Mr President. The content of his speech was also American. Mitterrand had just returned from a six-day visit to the USA, where he had visited Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley. He spoke enthusiastically of modernisation and new technology. He was not ashamed of what the Socialists had done in the past when they had tried to control incomes and prices: but now he ...”

“... peers! All other poets so much less friended, uncouther. He had great talent – but Lord Alfred Douglas and Evelyn Waugh (less awful) – really, who needs them?5 Lord Alfred needed selling to the smugglers6 for a few beers, with his ghastly poems (and who, now, reads them?). I’d rather they honoured Grigson or Bunting7 or anyone less televised. Someone ...”

“... two teachers involved in the Resistance were forcibly detained in the house of a priest. The next day Touvier and an associate were forced to take refuge in the same house. As the Allies approached and the Germans blew up bridges, he claims that the four of them, the two members of the Resistance and the two members of the Milice, sat on the terrace with the ...”

“... that he never seems to have found himself sitting next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf. None of them would have found it strange that he was reading up the history of past sporting events. The other, more chilling observation seeks to assure us that, in spite of the beliefs of what he ...”

“... in newspaper offices. Matters came to a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of ...”

“... quite a lot about the time-servers – quite a lot, if he wants to air it, on Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, David Owen. On the UN, which is less a matter of dishing dirt than asking very basic questions, he is in a trickier position. In March 1999, Nato was in breach of international law and until quite recently, Milosevic was a stickler for international ...”

“... to Rider Haggard with the outline of a story he’d recently heard, a ‘thing picked up the other day across some drinks’: There was first one Englishman and one mummy. They met in Egypt and the live man bought the dead, for it was a fine dead. Then the dead was unrolled and in the last layers of the cloth that malignant Egyptian had tucked away a ...”

“... Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ‘Fourteen Day Rule’, under which no subject likely to be debated in the Commons within the next fortnight could be discussed on television, was eventually swept away in the maelstrom of Suez. Party Conferences were not covered by television until 1955. There was no ...”

“... of the French Empire (or the French Union, as it became known in 1946). For France to have one day to abdicate its imperial role there seemed to many a prospect worse than the defeats of 1870-71 and June 1940. Not that everyone saw the country solely in terms of French power. A selection of articles published in the Revue des Deux Mondes over the last 140 ...”

“... he reassures Beauvoir: ‘pour vous, mon doux petit, pas de pénible retour.’ This example of a day in the life of a great writer is not edifying, and it is difficult to see why, in the same letter, Sartre should grumble about having to give up his time in order to see some friend of Koestler’s. More serious, however, is the cruelty which the letter ...”

“... busy place. Like Nikolai Rostov, most soldiers experience it as strangely empty. Even on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a British field artillery officer looking towards the German trenches could see ‘not a single soldier ... not a movement of any sort’. A British parachutist in combat in 1982 reported: ‘I didn’t really see any Argies ...”