“... China’ was about to rejoin the world. The Geneva Accords on Indochina, which ended France’s colonial wars in South-East Asia and partitioned Vietnam, had been a personal triumph for the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai. Urbane, amusing and fluent in their languages, Zhou charmed foreign diplomats and journalists off their feet. Perhaps, they began ...”

“... eyes, smiling the cheerful smile of the dead, Munditia still greets visitors to the Church of St Peter in her glass case. Since the late 17th century she has served as the patroness and protector of single, unmarried women. Her feast day, traditionally celebrated with great ceremony, falls on 17 November. Koudounaris describes the miraculous cures that the ...”

“... of fish and chips.’ (But it’s true: ‘rock salmon’ in Britain, or ‘saumonette’ in France, is spiny dogfish, once one of the most abundant shark species in the world and now critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic.) Personally, I’ll read pretty much any old rubbish about sharks and absolutely anything about shark attacks. We shark ...”

“... to Strasbourg, where they lived for five years. French was Ferlinghetti’s first language, and France was the culture to which, in later years, he aspired. On their return to the US, Emily placed her nephew in an orphanage in Chappaqua, a hamlet in northern Westchester County, New York. John Cheever territory. The sort of hallucinated commuter retreat ...”

“... subjects were politically conscious, active and disaffected. In Roman Imperial Themes (1990), Peter Brunt reminds us that ‘in the very century when Roman rule was to vanish in Gaul, a Gallic poet celebrated Rome as the city which had unified the world by giving the conquered a share in rights.’ Brunt adds: ‘What a contrast with the jubilation that ...”

“... Christopher Brown’s Images of a Golden Past: Dutch Genre Painting of the 17th Century and Peter Sutton’s exhibition catalogue, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Genre Painting, both appeared in 1984.) The text is supplemented with nearly 250 images, many in colour, as well as more than forty pages of triple-column notes and an extensive ...”

“... massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger later attended Stonyhurst College; the Claimant was barely literate. The best that could be said for him was that he waggled his eyebrows in a way that reminded his supporters of Roger. Nor was ...”

“... he went to Paris to study medicine, qualifying in due course as ‘the youngest MD ever created in France’. Monsieur le Suédois was soon a popular society doctor, diagnosing wealthy hypochondriacs with ‘colitis’ and prescribing lapdogs for bored dowager marquises, as well as doing unpaid rounds among the Italian immigrants in the slums of ...”

“... will continue to follow the US’s lead. Fernandes quotes a former Australian minister of defence, Peter Dutton, to the effect that Australian participation in any potential conflict between the US and China is seen as preordained.Australia’s future military plans put considerable emphasis on submarine warfare. The AUKUS deal, signed between Australia, the ...”

“... in Italy, is gaining ground in Scandinavia and has all but wiped out the social-democratic left in France. Last year, the Alternative für Deutschland overtook the ruling Social Democrats in the polls. It’s easy to see why Orbán said in 2017 that ‘27 years ago here in Central Europe we believed that Europe was our future; today we feel that we are the ...”

“... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...”

“... books. Prescott failed the 11-plus and is stinging about the experience. His father came back from France an amputee and thereafter became an accomplished cadger and skiver, an energetic seeker of free admission and free drinks; also a trade-union official and a JP. Prescott had next to no education, and left school at 15 to work in hotels, before getting a ...”

“... matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who’s had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the notorious Papin sisters – real-life models for the homicidal domestics in Genet’s The Maids – disembowelled their bourgeois mistress and her daughter in a fit of bestial frenzy after the unfortunate Mme Lancelin complained once too often ...”

“... a scholarship more than adequate for his needs, and spent the summer of 1936 tramping around France and Spain. By the time he showed up at Cambridge that autumn, he was already unusual: in his knowledge, range, languages, Continental connections, political commitments (he joined the party at this point) and, frankly, intellectual confidence. Still ...”

“... system, least of all with representative government, as nowadays in England, America and France it seems popular to believe.On such grounds Waugh accounted for the decline of Britain and the decay of her empire in Augustinian terms. The whole world was so sunk in original sin that by no act of their own will could men change things for the ...”