“... too remained in segregated enclaves. In fact, I doubt whether we can find any places before the French Revolution, except for small refugee communities in France and the Netherlands and the ancient communities in Northern Italy and the South of France, where the totality of Jews, and not merely the elite, were integrated into the surrounding ...”

“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... he learned or taught himself several modern languages, and was particularly strong in German and French. He claimed to understand eight languages and, as Joyce said, he made a liberal parade of his learning: ‘He has read recklessly in many literatures, crossing how many seas, and even penetrated into Peristan, to which no road leads that the feet ...”

“... is Emma Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903): the story, set during the Terror, of a beautiful French actress married to a wealthy but vapid British baronet. The actress despises her husband and is greatly taken by stories of a nameless Englishman who has been rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine; every time he spirits another royalist to England, the ...”

“... Protestant reform in each of their provincial towns), and they remained sufficiently interested in French politics to write in a surprisingly well-informed fashion about the subject twenty years later. The dispute between Henri of Navarre and his estranged Catholic wife, Marguerite de Valois, over control of Aquitaine; the wider dynastic and religious feuding ...”

“... but its appeal to racial authenticity troubled him: he thought of himself as a son of the French Revolution rather than as an African, and the struggles in the colonies as a sequel to the storming of the Bastille. ‘Je suis français’ were the first three words he learned to spell. After the fall of France in 1940, Admiral Georges Robert, high ...”

“... her life are known only scantly. In the absence of any comprehensive account of Bishop’s life, David Kalstone seems to have opted for an approach to the poet that might be termed semi-biographical. There are frustrations that attend even his scrupulous and sympathetic discussion of Bishop and her friendships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The ...”

“... of the John Sylvesters of this world. A prodigious historian, Porter has done the work that French historians can only theorise about. He has travelled from writing about 18th-century English geology, English 18th-century social history, the social history of medicine and science, to madness and to books about madness. Porter (once again, the surnames ...”

“... writing learned memoranda for the Committee of Imperial Defence based upon the hypothesis of a French invasion of England. He was much slower than his presumably non-intellectual colleague, Joseph Chamberlain, to see that Germany, not France, was the danger. As late as 1908 Balfour assumed that in a war Britain’s enemy would in the first instance be a ...”

“... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...”

“... not shirk from questioning the motives of his opponents, from the wicked Saddam, to the malicious French, to the self-serving Liberal Democrats, to the cynical media. Moreover, it is central to the political philosophy of Blairism that actions that may conceivably endanger the most fundamental interests of the international community can be justified by the ...”

“... ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior archaeological colleague, then a fellow officer, included a study of Crusader castles done in the field, which involved an examination of the Syrian citadel, Krak des Chevaliers, then little-known in Britain. This suggests ...”

“... defence forces along the Mosel river, diminished in size but still relatively intact. The Free French launched small attacks, but the local population was, Ludewig suggests, mostly quiet – an attitude that may well have been prompted by the massacre of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane by Waffen-SS soldiers a few weeks before. Model, on the other hand, had ...”

“... book Patrick Modiano, published in 1996, and there have been several full-length works on him in French since, and plenty of articles. With Louis Malle, Modiano wrote the screenplay for Lacombe, Lucien (1974), and he wrote a book in collaboration with Catherine Deneuve, called Elle s’appelait Françoise . . . I haven’t been able to get hold of this or ...”