“... After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry ...”

“... on a transcendent scale: just how transcendent you can see by looking at one of the tables in Charles Williams’s book, which shows Bradman, with his lifetime Test average of 99.94, almost forty runs an innings ahead of any other player, the run-rich Lara included. Not that a single hit for four would have done for me that day; I wanted to sit through a ...”

“... Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and Blanchot. With Lewis Carroll, it was love at first sight, but the infatuation was short-lived: humour was not Duras’s strong point. She laughed a lot, it is ...”

“... the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit for discoveries, how can historians hope to do better, let alone ...”

“... on both sides of the Atlantic. These were not just any old fleeting celebrities: they included Charles Laughton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ira Gershwin, e.e. cummings and Lord Mountbatten. He became conspicuously friendly with the Duke of Edinburgh. Science was not then, and has never been, a celebrity preoccupation, but war tends to move science rapidly up ...”

“... for the intimacy between language and power germinated in France during the last decade of de Gaulle, and took root in the United States during the Reagan years. For the twin properties of language that seemed to be self-evident were precisely those with which many left-leaning academics were preoccupied – authoritarian power and the resistance ...”

“... present-day Gabon to discuss the dreams of Jacques Foccart, ‘a master manipulator’ employed by De Gaulle and known as ‘the White Sorcerer’. De Gaulle set up Elf Aquitaine in order to try and crack the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon oil companies and Elf Gabon, one of its subsidiaries, proved crucial. Foccart ...”

“... of the ERM some six years ago. (Britain has had a persistent trade deficit despite its massive de facto devaluation in 1992.) Nor has France suffered from the impact of globalisation and international capital mobility as many predicted it would. When, in the early Nineties, Hoover decided to move its headquarters from France, citing high social security ...”

“... projects, this excessively long biography offers both ugly revelations and moving insights. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own ...”

“... hostility to decolonisation during the Algerian War of Independence, the old Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International) had changed its name to the Parti socialiste in 1969. Two years later it merged with several smaller centre-left parties and selected as its leader François Mitterrand, a stalwart ...”

“... died.Of the three it was Cosway, born in 1760, who had the strangest start in life. Her parents, Charles and Isabella Hadfield, had settled in Florence where they ran an inn, Carlo’s, on the left bank of the Arno, which catered for the flow of Grand Tourists from England and Scotland. Even the most sophisticated of travellers might be homesick and the ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... in an implausible number of car accidents with a string of different men; first with the singer Charles Aznavour in July 1951; then again with Aznavour a month later – this time her lover, the cyclist André Pousse, was also in the car. In 1958, she had two accidents on the same stretch of road with another lover, Georges Moustaki, an Egyptian-French ...”

“... non-violent Nationalist Arthur Griffith but from 1917 led by the senior survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera – this new radical movement won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster in the December 1918 General Election. Assembling in Dublin on 19 January 1919, those elected members not in prison or ‘on the run’ met as Dáil Éireann – the Parliament ...”

“... Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for the Resistance under cover of his work in the textile trade. After crossing into Spain through the Pyrenees, he had presented himself ...”