“... of them – scanning is required if you want to be offered housing. In Niamey, Niger’s capital, French and UN specialists assess asylum claims at a distance of several thousand miles from the French coast, with only the most plausible applicants approved for the onward journey. It’s the sort of offshore processing that ...”

“... alien to their own. Kennedy’s and Johnson’s advisers ignored the clear lesson of the French defeat in Indochina (amply documented in the writings of Bernard Fall) that bombing could not prevent infiltration from the North. Instead of bringing North Vietnam to its knees, the saturation bombing of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ simply encouraged ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... collection of essays, On Fashion (1994), Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris traced the change to French feminist theory, ‘whose stylish, wickedly witty, playful intellectualism made our heads spin’. Indeed, they argued, there was no escape from fashion, just as there was no escape from literary theory. Protest it how you will, fashion will consume and ...”

“... I was approaching 13: the huge anti-Suez demonstration in 1956, when the targets were British and French imperialism, and Israel of course – and it was amazing. The university students came to our school to have it closed so we could join the demo, and the principal, Brother Henderson, closed it for the day. Because there was no martial law, no military ...”

“... operational commander. His contempt for Anderson, Commander of First Army (a British army but with French and American corps besides), became ever more stridently expressed as the two armies came together under one Army Group command. First Army had been built up in Tunisia after the TORCH landings, and Monty had already been scathing about what he had heard ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... chums to the Dardanelles, parading their Classical learning as they passed the islands. Sir John French, C-in-C of the expeditionary force and a doting admirer of the group, desperately wanted to keep them out of harm’s way, but they traded on friendships with Winston Churchill and other prime movers to make sure they went where the action was: honour ...”

“... the pursuit of knowledge. I was surprised to learn that in 1915 it was accepted wisdom that the French invented, while the Germans and British turned their inventions to profit: many of my contemporaries in the Cavendish had to go to America in order to find someone interested in turning their inventions to profit. I wonder what killed the British spirit of ...”

“... work as beautiful as the Japanese.For much of her life, Mary Cassatt was the American face of French Impressionism; up until the 1920s she was better known in the US than Degas was. She brought the good news from Europe in another way too: as intermediary, go-between and tipster. She encouraged both her brother Alexander and her lifelong friend Louisine ...”

“... sensible people. That a different answer is possible, even preferable, owes much to the work of French sociologist-philosopher Bruno Latour. Latour came into view in the 1980s as an uncommonly engaging as well as radical practitioner of the new discipline of science studies. The accounts of scientific facts and technological artefacts set out in his early ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like ...”

“... Egyptian abstemiousness. In a short while he had all the usual one-incident pick-ups, most of them French trade, and at least one affair in which the affections if not the heart were touched.’ ‘At parties, at bars, in New York or wherever he travelled, there was the expectation of erotic excitement, of one-night or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely ...”

“... foreign correspondent, once asked Mao Tse-tung for his appraisal of the social implications of the French Revolution. Mao reflected a while and then, shaking his head, said: ‘I think it’s still a bit too early to tell.’ The late Chinese leader’s caution might seem excessive even to the most obsessive historians. In today’s hurried ...”