“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... microcephaly and other neurological disorders reported in Brazil, following a similar cluster in French Polynesia in 2014, constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.’ The statement by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, on 1 February was very precise. It wasn’t about the spread of Zika virus itself, but ...”

“... in his hands and pointed out to the right of the frame. He is wearing the uniform of a Zouave, a French infantry regiment famous for its élan and baggy red trousers; he now has a full beard, his gaze follows the line of the gun, and there’s a pipe clamped between his teeth. It is 1855, and Fenton has returned from the Crimea, where the war is still going ...”

“... stopped at the port en route to West Africa: Bordeaux was one of the major anchorages along the French coast. Nantes dominated the business in African captives, but 346 slave trading expeditions left Bordeaux in the 18th century, the majority heading for the plantations of St Domingue. The shipowners, captains and traders were part of a large population ...”

“... who all along decried the rumours of a rocket attack as ‘a mare’s nest’ (thus giving David Irving the title for a book) and said of Sir Stafford Cripps, who took the threat seriously: ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ Even when it was indubitably clear what was on the way, Cherwell fell back to arguing that the ...”

“... into the collective named, variously, structuralism, post-structuralism or (stranger yet) ‘French Theory’, Deleuze is the least well known or understood in the English-speaking world. It is easy to ” see why this might be so, at least superficially. Although to some eyes his career and interests might appear to have been traditionally philosophical ...”

“... Smiley, modelled largely on Bingham, that le Carré owed his success.’ (To Bingham, moreover, David Cornwell owed his pen-name, via the French for ‘the square’.) The novelist Bingham liked plots, as might a man who was both a novelist and a runner of agents. He didn’t like the ‘fluffy stuff’ of ...”

“... bombing of 1984; had Gore been president on 9/11 (in this last essay, written by the neo-con David Frum, any pretence to serious history is abandoned in favour of political propaganda masked as satire). No wonder Roberts refers approvingly to Kingsley Amis’s novel Russian Hide-and-Seek, which is set in a Soviet-occupied Britain. So what should the ...”