“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sublimation results in entropy. Jeremy delivers himself from it by learning to speak (in French, rather than his mother’s native English). He is the last of those to be felt gone from an atmosphere in Bowen’s fiction – but by no means the ...”

“... in a way that football referees are not? It’s not just us Brits. No Frenchman has won the French Open since 1983; no Australian has won the Australian Open since 1976. Where’s the home advantage? One explanation might be that playing at home really makes a difference only when you’re part of a team. It’s a collective experience, in which case it ...”

“... and career. As early as April 1933, the president described Hitler as ‘a madman’ to the French ambassador. The animosity was mutual: Hitler the eugenicist despised Roosevelt the cripple and his racist rhetoric was frequently aimed at ‘mongrel’ America. Roosevelt versus Hitler became a personal grudge match (much more so than Churchill ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but it would be more accurate to describe him as the ‘evil genius’ of his brother-in-law David Séchard, printer, inventor, mere technician and thus true man of the 19th century, who pays dearly for being over-impressed by Lucien’s intellectuality. ‘His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his modst ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... male and female, self and other, the sexual and the political. Writing about Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath , Kathy Acker commented on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous homage to Acker by rewriting – or, rather, parodying – her work that same ...”