“... who praises Foucault, who praises Barthes, who praises Attali [the trendy economic adviser to François Mitterrand], I am not so sure that I can have confidence in you any more.’ And so I had to answer: ‘Does this mean that I have to lose my confidence in you as well?’ French intellectual life is indeed characterised by the fact that these ...”

“... d’Estaing, another supercilious snob. Things improved when the French elected a socialist, François Mitterrand, as president. Mitterrand could relate to her personal vanity and he knew how to appeal to it. The Falklands War helped. When Thatcher launched her task force, ...”

“... so that it would be subject to the influence of others, above all the French themselves. François Mitterrand, ever duplicitous, was happy to whisper poison into Thatcher’s ear about their shared suspicion of the German national character, while at the same time doing everything he could to ensure that the vision of a greater Europe held by ...”

“... without it, the journey to Brussels and Paris took more than half an hour longer. It was only when François Mitterrand embarrassed the British government in his speech at the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 by observing that at least visitors to the UK would have time to admire the Kent countryside that plans for what is now HS1 were pursued in ...”

“... though Michel Rocard, an outstanding figure on the French left and prime minister under Mitterrand between 1988 and 1991, did his best to push the Palestinian cause up the list of foreign policy priorities. A Protestant by conviction before his late turn to agnosticism, Rocard rose through the Parti Socialiste Unifié, which opened a dialogue with ...”

“... often shaded into a general hostility towards the Anglo-Saxons. In the immediate post-war years François Mauriac, for example, chose to indulge in a little Anglophobia, recalling the burning at the stake of Joan of Arc, Saint Helena, the dum-dum bullet used against the Boers, and alleging British responsibility for both world wars. There were professors of ...”

“... to be, her work and its object.In 1974, Sinéty’s acquaintances in Poilley were happy about Mitterrand’s defeat in the presidential elections. ‘He used to wear spectacles,’ one of them tells her. ‘Then he took them off once he wanted to run for the presidency. Did he see any better? … He would look up, or to left and right, but he never looked ...”

“... election in June. The other figure Sarkozy has to bear in mind is 9.13 per cent, polled by François Bayrou, the dreary candidate for the centrist Mouvement Démocrate. Bayrou is hostile to Sarkozy and his ‘ideology of money’, but he is not a socialist. Nor are his followers, who turned on him in 2007 for even discussing the options with Ségolène ...”

“... turning their minds to the real showdown, the Presidential election of 1988. Without much doubt Mitterrand hopes to neutralise a Chirac government via his considerable Presidential powers and then secure the election of another Socialist President in 1988 – who would dissolve the Assembly and hope to sweep in a Left-Centre coalition, thus reducing 1986-88 ...”

“... war ended in 1945. Germany had former Nazis as its chancellor and president. The French president François Mitterrand had been an apparatchik in the Vichy regime. As late as 1992, Kurt Waldheim was president of Austria despite there being evidence of his involvement in Nazi atrocities.Even in the United States, there was ‘public silence and some sort ...”

“... origins are generally dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a Bougainville ...”

“... on the morning of Wednesday, 24 May 1989, a special unit of gendarmes entered the priory of Saint François at Nice in search of a certain Paul Touvier, who was living there under the name of Paul Lacroix. An arrest was made and within half an hour Touvier was on his way to Fresnes prison in Paris. He was eventually installed in its hospital. The gendarmes ...”

“... to avoid that fate, but their success should not be taken for granted. The bitter rivalry between Mitterrand’s Elysée and Chirac’s Hôtel de Ville has already caused the cancellation of Mitterrand’s plan for an international exhibition. Chirac, speaking as ‘M. le Maire’, argued that Paris couldn’t cope with all ...”

“... chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the ...”

“... vraie barbarie’)? The first view is that of the candidate for Les Républicains, François Fillon, speaking last summer, shortly before Emmanuel Macron, who took the second view, resigned as minister for the economy. Macron is now running as an independent, at the head of his centrist movement, En Marche! – a pessimist’s translation would ...”