“... in response to contact (and conflict) with the other – i.e. with Catholic and then republican France. In other words, Britishness can exist when the nations of the UK face a common external threat or challenge: in war, in the armed forces, in the East India Company or the Indian Civil Service, in a British embassy abroad, and so on. But do these ...”

“... Michelet and Taine on what they variously regarded as the glorious or inglorious revolution in France in 1789 (Burrow can’t contain his relish for the Old Testament thunderings of Carlyle, on whom his chapter is quite brilliant, any more than his distaste for the relentless Taine). He also discusses the imaginative celebrations of England’s communal ...”

“... of Amiens in 1802 saw a display outside the French ambassador’s residence where the figures of France and England stood united between the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Concord’. Unfortunately, some sailors in the crowd whose spelling was weak felt insulted at the implication they had been conquered and started a riot. The transparency was taken down and ...”

“... voice of the German people, however, since her father’s family were Huguenots who left France after the Edict of Nantes was revoked.The Grimms never quite came to terms with the awkward fact that folk tales are the ultimate creative migrants. They spread across regional and linguistic borders and blend into one another with as much vigour and ...”

“... later played down the importance of his partnership with Ronson. In The Man Who Sold the World, Peter Doggett quotes from an interview with Melody Maker at the beginning of 1976 (though you can’t really trust anything Bowie said in that period): ‘I honestly can’t remember Mick that well these days,’ he said. ‘He’s just like any other band member ...”

“... ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in fact – focuses on St Peter’s loving recollections of his former student Tom Outland, a prodigy and inventor who was killed in the First World War. The novel also ...”

“... of global access, not least as a result of airline price wars. It occurred at a time when France, Germany, Britain and others had made up their minds that the postwar experiment with immigration from the South was over. Refugees have paid a high price for this decision. They have also paid for the new prestige of the North American social and economic ...”

“... years later, it is an abrupt, allusive yarn about a group of English officers and men in northern France near the end of the First World War; and it is narrated by one of them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its ...”

“... not so fortunate. He fled to the Weevers family’s country house at Monguilhem in the South of France, but, bored with rural life, moved to Toulouse, where he managed to eke out a living teaching and perhaps playing a little: he was hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight. In April 1944 he was caught in a round-up on the streets of Toulouse and taken to ...”

“... In France​ , Chris Kraus wrote in an essay from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense ...”

“... so many cases) to mutilation and death, does not allow us to forget that, but for the war with France, civil war might have led to worse horrors, that Henry’s options are few. All of this Anne Barton gets right. She fully understands the ideological context, the background of quasi-mythical expectations, but she does not flatten Shakespeare into an inert ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... the living-room floor, jobs (and failing to get jobs), holidays (family packages to the South of France and Morocco figure prominently as the outer limits of the exotic). Since Larkin and Douglas Dunn’s Terry Street, the landscape of Kingston-upon-Hull has come to look like Grantchester, Adlestrop and far Araby all rolled into one. It crops up twice in ...”

“... harpy of ‘Bang bang, you’re dead’; the jobs at the Foreign Office, at the Poetry Society, at Peter Owen, that became the jobs written about in Loitering with Intent, A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) and no doubt others. But it skates over many things about which eager beavers may want to know more: Muriel Camberg’s disastrous teenage marriage to Sydney ...”

“... conference on refugees in 1936 and careful to make no commitments at a similar conference in France two years later. A pattern began to emerge in the Irish handling of the refugee problem. The Department of Justice was inflexible and would only bend under direct pressure from the Taoiseach’s office, and the Taoiseach’s office dealt only with cases ...”