“... a figure of industrial Britain as the sharecropper of Dust Bowl America, or the peasant of la France profonde. Such images, embedded in the national unconscious, and springing to life in times of crisis, were sufficiently potent to win the miners an astonishing breadth of public support during the national strike of 1972. Harold Macmillan, who as MP for ...”

“... the second time to a well-off widow, wrote The Spirit of the Age and the Life of Napoleon, toured France and Italy, and died in Soho in 1830 reputedly with the words: ‘Well, I’ve had a happy life!’ But what about Sarah Walker? She moves forever – alternately prim and sensuous, banal and bewitching – across the lurid stage of the Liber Amoris, but ...”

“... funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance she didn’t like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on holiday there. Before Christmas she and her sister took off for South America and this last week the market men in Inverness Street got a postcard from Stephanie in Peru, which they pinned up on ...”

“... He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties. Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany which Mann had had with his brother ...”

“... comparative research. Yet while there were in Moscow dozens of specialists on the United States, France or West Germany, there was not a single one on Georgia or Estonia. The Baltic republics, annexed by Stalin in 1940, formed a region of their own within the USSR. There political organisation under perestroika had first taken outspoken nationalist form. But ...”

“... Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable. The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French ...”

“... motives – he once took him, on Keats’s dime, to gamble and visit brothels in the South of France. But George was younger, less responsible and impatient to start his own life. He had been waiting only to turn 21 and claim his inheritance before he married Georgiana Wylie and took off for America.His abrupt decision to emigrate was a bad blow, but for ...”

“... It was an ecstatic evening, from the royal arrival just after nine until ‘at 1.45 the king rose and I showed him to his car … it was the very peak, the summit, I suppose of social superiority, the King of England and the Kents etc to dine, to dine with me.’ (Channon was puzzled when the king said ‘I want to pump shit,’ presumably a mishearing ...”

“... fight a full-scale naval war, where its sheer size would put off any potential enemy (Russia and France were then the favourites, and the Royal Navy’s ships outnumbered both these countries’ Navies put together). ‘Five strategic keys lock up the world,’ Admiral (later First Sea Lord) Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher said. He had in mind Singapore, the ...”

“... a minister of finance with a secret bank account in Switzerland. No sooner said, than seen. In France, the Socialist minister for the budget, plastic surgeon Jérôme Cahuzac, whose brief was to uphold fiscal probity and equity, was discovered to have somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas ...”

“... our bodies standing in the room they were originally made for?Connoisseurs in the 18th century in France (for a while the paintings belonged to the duc d’Orléans) gave us our first inkling of the paintings’ Italian titles – Infedeltà, Disinganno, Rispetto and Unione felice – and then later suggested they were meant as ceiling decoration. There is no ...”

“... as avant-garde. The homosexuals and pornographers, male and female, dominate the scene.’ Others rose above the gay panic, preserving a semblance of judicial decorum as they sought to relegate Sontag to the novelty department, the repository of passing fads. In his landmark zoological study ‘The New York Intellectuals’, published in Dissent in ...”

“... letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’, which will come as a relief to readers worried about the Nordic connection. And this is what he wrote to Stanley Unwin ...”

“... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...”

“... the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other enemies is very far from over. He is going after the ...”