“... To counter the objections, the case for HS2 needs to be overwhelming. And it is not. The French use their LGV (Lignes à Grande Vitesse) for postal services as well as passenger trains and the TGV shares the tracks with conventional services at the Paris terminuses, but broadly speaking, high-speed railways are the motorways of the rail network: they ...”

“... be good. 11 June. France 0 Denmark 2. Ireland 3 Saudi Arabia 0. Hee hee. What smug twerps the French have been, both on the pitch and by not rebuilding the team after winning the Cup in 1998. They didn’t even look as if they were trying all that hard until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is similar. Perez is interested in ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’, but thinks that what distinguishes them is their variousness. ‘Most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something ...”

“... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...”

“... his short hair pure white. With glasses, he looks like an upper-level, not absolutely top-grade French bureaucrat, an administrator in a colonial territory (such as the Algeria in which he spent his early life). Without glasses, he could pass for a French movie star, a mix of Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. A witty local ...”

“... do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords with the Egyptian Government of Sadat. Shepherd was one of those alarmed by Israel’s new right-wing government, headed by Menachem Begin: religious parties allied themselves with the right-wingers, rejecting Labour and the old ...”

“... the Parisian Nazi Armand Grégoire. Even when the war was on, she fraternised with the pro-Nazi French businessman, Charles Bedaux. Perhaps her most consistent British confidante and friend was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing ...”

“... ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university recently founded in Wittenberg, a small town built on a sandbank in middle ...”

“... she reminds him of Hardy’s Eustacia Vye. His sea-loving family recalls the Peggotys in David Copperfield. His uncle at the tiller is like Tashtego in Moby-Dick. His mother, on the other hand, has not read a book since high school – ‘then she had read Ivanhoe and considered it a colossal waste of time.’ While her son sits at school discussing ...”

“... world to develop a coherent scheme of public or administrative law’; yet, he says, ‘successive French constitutions from 1799 to 1958 have been characterised by a persistent hostility to judicial interference with the two other branches of the state.’ If this is literally the case, it is simply because judicial oversight of public administration is ...”

“... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...”

“... the volume of academic literature about them, where the legendary overproduction of writing by the French about their national icons – there are three thousand books on de Gaulle, five times as many as on Churchill – needs to be taken into account. A more significant index is translation. On the centenary of Du côté de chez Swann, a colloquium could ...”

“... sentenced 13 of them to death. The ‘boss’, a powerful Indonesian Chinese businessman known as David Wong, was arrested in Indonesia and sent to prison for six years. Wong is by no means the only boss. Sony Wei, the leader of the pirates who hijacked the Chang Sheng, spoke, in the course of his testimony, of working for another Indonesian Chinese ...”

“... the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such ...”