“... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, that little football scholarship guy from Lowell, Massachusetts, had wanted his name on the wall too. Yes he did. A few years after his appearance on the Steve Allen Show, Kerouac’s name turned up on the bathroom wall of the White ...”

“... which life at La Borde presented. His soixante-huitard friends (La Borde’s director, Jean Oury, called them ‘the barbarians’) staged regular invasions of the clinic. During the day, there were performances in the courtyard: a Japanese mime troupe, a Maoist magician, sometimes the patients themselves – on Bastille Day, they dressed up as ...”

“... expense of further integration. Having Eastern Europe in meant that the possibility of permanent Franco-German domination was out. During these years of effective ‘UK-ification’ of the EU, Britain gained allies across the continent. Eastern Europeans were grateful for its steadfast support of enlargement. Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands – all ...”

“... the early years of the war and his family’s conservatism. Gavin’s mother thinks that General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and ...”

“... with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone de Beauvoir is important only because of her association with Sartre. Her four volumes of autobiography are sometimes seen merely as useful source ...”

“... was almost certainly economical with the truth. A rival anthrax vaccine had been produced by Jean-Joseph Toussaint, a young professor at Toulouse Veterinary School, who treated the bacteria with antiseptic to kill them. His approach, in other words, was fundamentally different from Pasteur’s, which was to enfeeble, but not kill, the organisms by ...”

“... a free trade area looked as if they might be more attractive to Bonn, threatening the primacy of Franco-German commercial ties. But it was not the technical opinion of hauts fonctionnaires that decided the issue. Nor was it the personal preference of Mollet himself, who had always favoured European integration but been quite unable to carry his party, the ...”

“... and following three decades of on-off nomadic wanderings – Voltaire bought an estate on the Franco-Swiss border at Ferney. There he would spend the rest of his life – as an improving landlord. ‘Cultivating his garden’ meant for Voltaire draining marshes, bringing disused land back under the plough, planting vines and fruit trees, creating a stud ...”

“... and state – the Enlightenment as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s dialectical thinking. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in the ...”

“... linguistic implications and secrets that it couldn’t see what wasn’t hiding in plain sight. Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2005) recommended an alertness to data and difference, and a certain aloofness from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden ...”

“... that the PR was best handled by himself. One of his most loyal and perceptive friends, the writer Jean Grosjean, whom he first met in a POW camp in 1940, spoke of Malraux’s ‘juvenile mixture of ostentation and pudeur’, the sadness being that the ostentation did its job of masking the pudeur so effectively that few people would have credited him with ...”

“... and Washington still resemble those of courtiers paying tribute to the throne. Last June, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson, was asked whether Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, would be staying in his post for the moment. Jean-Pierre answered that Biden ‘hasn’t made any decision yet’. The ...”

“... not actually dumped, however, until 21 September 1794, the day the body of the martyred radical Jean-Paul Marat entered. In 1797 the relatively conservative regime wanted to bring Mirabeau back, but his body was nowhere to be found. (This was not the only lost body: the hero of Verdun in 1792, General Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire, was supposedly sent to the ...”

“... choses dont je suis le maître mais pas volontairement l’acteur]. The interviewer turned to Jean Cocteau and asked for his impressions. Cocteau’s reply is indicative: he seems to be struggling between the epic and post-epic frames of reference that the new mural put in question, hanging onto the possibility of history and tragedy, but glimpsing (his ...”

“... into submission by LSD and hedonism. Paris’s leading artists and intellectuals praise the camp; Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but ...”