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“... goods – toing and froing by ferry. But the war of decolonisation – 1954-62 – still dogs the Franco-Algerian partnership and alluding to it in an election campaign, as Macron has, is risky; in this election especially, where sensitivities are heightened by an ongoing state of emergency declared after the jihadist killings in Paris in 2015.‘Une vraie ...”

“... facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence. The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even ...”

“... 1073 people. The German Institute, which was attached to the Paris Embassy, sought to advance Franco-German co-operation in the new Europe, and a separate office was created to promote German culture and the ‘purification’ of literature. Books were seized (143 different titles in August 1940), and the names of banned writers listed (739 Jewish writers ...”

“... sisters from the house of Denmark. Wilhelm and Nicholas II were both great-great-grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The kaiser’s great-great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the tsar’s grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud. As its subtitle suggests, Miranda Carter’s ...”

“... of interest in the history of frames has often come from frame-makers and dealers – such as Paul Levi, to whom the catalogue of the Metropolitan’s exhibition of Italian Renaissance frames is dedicated, or Timothy Newbery, who is one of its co-authors. Dealers have also mounted small scholarly exhibitions in both London and Paris. The most splendid of ...”

“... Luther, Spinoza and Tyndale. Still, a phrase keeps recurring to my mind. It comes, bizarrely, from Paul Newman in The Verdict, as he mutters anxiously outside the courtroom: ‘There are no other cases. This is the case.’ By this he plainly means to convey, not that there are no other disputes or dramas or miscarriages of justice, but that this one has ...”

“... 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence of utopian ...”

“... Dieulafoy (b. 1851), was a French patriot, a Catholic, an archaeologist and a sharpshooter in the Franco-Prussian War. They were married to the engineer and archaeologist Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy and together the couple undertook a number of expeditions to Persia. Their ‘common dress’ reflected their common interests (one journalist wrote that ...”

“... commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible rhythm’. Some of the Penguin contes seem locked ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to inevitability.’ This doesn’t, I think, preclude the view offered fifty years ago by Paul Schroeder, a leading American diplomatic historian, that the statesmen and politicians involved felt themselves to be in the grip of forces beyond their control and that this perception influenced their actions. Nor does it mean that some – indeed most ...”

“... surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller ...”

“... with its nostalgia for the old ways, and its little jokes about religion (‘my theory why St Paul speaks as he does of women: that he knew only church workers’). A diary entry speaks of ‘that English mixture of the genteel and the raffish’, another of ‘lovely Suffolk, how it combines amplitude with modesty, a model to the English mind’. A sort ...”

“... knew Sanskrit and could rapidly mug up almost any other language he wanted (chatting away to Paul Kruger in Afrikaans, for example). As a child brought up by a single parent without any of the advantages of aristocratic descent or a wider family network, he embraced wholeheartedly and romantically all the institutions of the establishment, and they in ...”