“... Rose was my next-door-neighbour-but-one when I lived in the furthermost reaches of Camden – three steps and one foot off the pavement and I was alienated in Islington. Rose was in her eighties and her husband had just died. I popped round to have a cup of tea and found her sitting in her darkened front room as glum as an old wife and new widow might be expected to be ...”

“... out. Local health officialdom rules La signora è malata. Not welcome this side of the frontier. France is not far: why don’t I try cousin Connie Beauchamp? Nice place they say they’ve got in Menton. She and inseparable Jinnie Fullerton. This horrible cough! Kind souls. Perhaps their prayers will work with a few more Hail Marys thrown in. Connie or ...”

“... political writings which emerged late in his career. It was the career of a teacher, chiefly in France at the college of Sainte-Barbe in Paris and as professor of Latin at Bordeaux, and in Portugal at Coimbra. He was tutor to Montaigne and, most famously, to James VI and I, whose political views he can have engendered only by opposition. He was a friend to ...”

“... strengthen Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, unite the island of Britain and guarantee peace with France. His candidate was intelligent (if not quite as scholarly as Elizabeth), above average height (at five foot eleven), well educated, attractive, good humoured, age appropriate, healthy and athletic, and shared Elizabeth’s interests in ...”

“... There is a general impression, both inside the country and abroad, that France is floundering in the face of its many political, social and economic problems – which is why winning the World Cup was held to be so important. Jonathan Fenby’s fine book, On the Brink: The Trouble with France, explores the multi-faceted nature of this crisis, from the decline of the baguette to widespread political corruption ...”

“... Life expectancy for women in the UK is now lower than in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Men do little better. In almost every other affluent country, apart from the US, people live longer than in the ...”

“... Saxon court, along with four long volumes of memoirs. He was awarded a prize by the Institut de France for his work on the circulatory system of insects. He seemed to excel at all subjects. But he published quickly, often at great length and with varying degrees of precision. His books are ‘islands of visionary insight’, the historian of science Franz ...”

“... the coastal battery offering protection to the mouth of the Tyne during the wars against France and Germany. The guns were decommissioned in 1956. The North Light gone in a smoke of sea-spray, its stone still riding in and out of sight; the frayed pennons and bannerets of the tide-crests all that is visible now, in the haar-light and the shoaling ...”

“... In July 1785, Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France, paid a visit to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Its three-metre-thick walls had previously imprisoned Diderot and the Marquis de Sade. Now, however, it housed the workshop of a gunsmith, Honoré Blanc, and a dozen assistants. As Jefferson watched, Blanc sorted into bins the pieces of 50 musket flintlocks: ‘tumblers, lock plates, frizzens, pans, cocks, sears, bridals, screws and springs ...”

“... into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England. James IV’s army was equipped with an impressive number of modern cannon cast in bronze and was accompanied by Continental experts in the latest techniques in warfare. The army and its ...”

“... cities. Hasty polls announced that 70 or 80 per cent of the population, including many in France’s largest conurbations, supported this massive show of impatience. Yet the gilets jaunes first came together beyond the margins of the major cities, in rural areas and small towns with rundown services, low-wage economies and dwindling commerce. They ...”

“... France​ doesn’t do race. Article 1 of the French constitution asserts ‘the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion’. In 1978 a law banned the collection and use of personal data based on ‘the alleged racial origin or the ethnic origin’ of individuals. Breaching the ban is a criminal offence, inviting a fine of up to €300,000 or a jail sentence of up to five years ...”

“... representations of human life’. During his exile the king had seen women on the stage in France, and he missed them. There was no outcry. And if at first the women weren’t very good (Pepys says they didn’t learn their lines), their appeal was all too obvious. When the first professional English actress (no one knows her name) stepped out as ...”

“... went a little further, but Johnson resisted calls for a stronger response. Case numbers rose sharply, hospital admissions and deaths rose less dramatically. The system was never overwhelmed and many will feel Johnson made the right call.But to judge how well Johnson and his government have done overall, we need to ...”

“... had been willing to admit as much. In 2019 he authorised a commission to report on the role of France in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and on a trip to Kigali in 2021 acknowledged its ‘damning responsibility’, though his commission was careful to say that France was not ‘complicit’. In 2020 he ordered ...”