“... the story of an early lead, in this case literally lead, becoming a handicap. Already during the French Revolution Carnot had commissioned an inventor, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, to produce a native pencil, and Conté had responded in 1794 with what soon became the international pencil: the lead in it was made up of a mixture of water, graphite and clay, and ...”

“... said and not enough on the way of saying. A second might be that a European (and particularly French) sense of the mystique of language itself entered poetry in English through Modernism, and just as Modernism has thrived in America and been rejected in England, so does the language of the modern American poem tend to come to life of itself rather than ...”

“... other times I thought it was moving his way. Zhou En-lai’s famous remark about the impact of the French Revolution, that it was too early to tell, might be said of the impact of the Oslo Accord. Said called his most recent book The End of the Peace Process: that strikes me as premature. What was started at Oslo is still alive, if only just. The peace process ...”

“... The erosion of the academic system by market pressures, and its temporary abolition during the French Revolution, accentuated the studio’s function as an entrepreneurial space. In the wonderfully vivid ensembles that Boilly staged in the studios of the painter Isabey (in 1798) and the sculptor Houdon (in 1804) we can see the affirmation of these ...”

“... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...”

“... a first and a last in Western Europe. In its wake there were tangible gains for the majority of French citizens. Two militants at a Peugeot assembly plant in Franche-Comté were killed by security forces in the aftermath, when the workforce decided to stay on strike – one was shot, the other forced to jump off a bridge, or some say a wall – but no one ...”

“... several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had no idea of being in competition with her. They all travelled and exhibited internationally to varying degrees of acclaim. Their careers required constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal ...”

“... The invasion demonstrated the RPF’s potential military superiority. With help from the French, the Rwandese government forces repelled the attack, but the invasion served to encourage opposition to one-party rule, while the RPF continued to mount attacks from territory it held inside Rwanda and along the Ugandan border. The Government began to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”