“... 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 ...”

“... at Nissan), and too indeterminate in origin (born in Brazil, raised in Lebanon, educated in France) to embody any obviously opposed national interest. True, he was from Renault, in which the French government still held a significant stake, but the company appeared to be pursuing a genuine alliance rather than a merger, and this too positioned Ghosn for ...”

“... indirect commodity taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ...”

“... poet’s business is to astonish.’ Marino might have led him to the important tension set up in France between le merveilleux païen and le merveilleux chrétien – all deeply relevant to his assessment of the missionary project of the Spaniards and sacred and secular metonymy in Mandeville. Perhaps he might have found his way at last to les poissons ...”

“... to get married and bring a law-case against his officers for corruption. Then he went to France and on to Philadelphia, with a letter of introduction to Thomas Jefferson. He stayed in America for eight years, teaching French refugees and earning a great reputation as a controversial journalist, taking a strong pro-British line against the ...”

“... voice of the German people, however, since her father’s family were Huguenots who left France after the Edict of Nantes was revoked.The Grimms never quite came to terms with the awkward fact that folk tales are the ultimate creative migrants.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 ...”

“... underway, without too much blood on the wharves – but the present Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith, was amazingly unembarrassed by the way Patrick Stevedores abruptly kicked 1400 union members off their Melbourne dock one January midnight and replaced them with non-unionists. In the ensuing war the Maritime Union of Australia, nobody’s favourite ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Popham, at Westminster, the eleventh day of October in the third year of our reign in England, France, and Ireland, and in Scotland, the thirty-ninth. There was, of course, nothing voluntary about compliance with the writ. From the 16th century onwards, clear warning was given of the consequence of disobedience (‘and this in no wise omit, upon the peril ...”

“... 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 ...”