“... like him. This is an uncomfortable truth. But the same could be said of public support for Franco, Hitler or Mussolini. The Shah’s reign lasted, it’s worth remembering, for almost forty years; and it was not repression alone that kept him in power that long. Nor was it US support, although this is the way the revolution prefers to see it. The ...”

“... have pressed for a separate peace during the September 1939-June 1940 period, when the Anglo-Franco-German war was conspicuously not raging after Poland’s rapid defeat. Newly-elevated into the government after so long an exclusion, with a well-deserved reputation for bellicosity being his only claim to office, Churchill could hardly exceed Neville ...”

“... intended to help normalise relations with Russia: the catalogue opens with warm expressions of Franco-Russian harmony from Presidents Hollande and Putin. These now read rather hollow: last October, Putin strangely took offence at Hollande’s suggestion that he might be indicted for war crimes, and cancelled his trip to Paris (he was also going to open a ...”

“... and the Hanoverian accession in 1714. With the defeat of Catholic supporters of the deposed James II in Ireland – then a subordinate kingdom belonging to England – in 1690, sectarian divisions, which foreshadow the differences between today’s Ulster unionists and Irish nationalists, became more deeply entrenched. Gibraltar was acquired in 1704 ...”

“... culture: folk songs, riddles, Anansi stories and especially the Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Bible. Johnson recalls these biblical cadences blending into the rhythms of everyday speech, and later into the language of reggae and dub poetry.In November 1963, Johnson went to join his mother, who had emigrated to England to work as a nurse. London, he ...”

“... with Keegan, John Ramsden shifts our attention firmly to the postwar decades. Like Robert Rhodes James thirty years ago, he argues that if Churchill had died in 1939, his life would probably have been construed as a spectacular failure – more promise than performance. Gallipoli, 1915, was still held against him; since 1929 he had been railing in the ...”

“... work? Here the key term is the anomaly. An anecdote can serve as illustration. One day Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York together. Coming upon Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, depicting a servant-girl drowsing at a table laden with fruit, a wine-glass lying on its side, a painting of Cupid on the wall ...”

“... to the clever boy from Philadelphia.’ For Murray the great fault of what he calls Franco-American Modernism is that it was the creation of two men, Eliot and Pound, who were in flight from New World egalitarianism, which they believed could not be reconciled with their ideal of high culture. Because they were involved in burying their own ...”

“... On 12 March 1689, James II, the deposed king of England and Ireland, Catholic and absolutist, landed at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution ...”

“... into ironical euphemism, which shades into dandaical detachment. Flaubert, in despair at the Franco-Prussian war, and trying to maintain the primacy of art, commented that in the long run, perhaps the only function of such carnage was to provide writers with a few fine scenes. So here, the function of the octogenarian Breton woman who hangs herself, or ...”

“... opposition parties. Lugo became the presidential candidate of this alliance, with Federico Franco from the Liberals as his vice-president. Their six-point programme includes land reform (and a land survey), reform of the judiciary and ‘recovery of sovereignty’ – taken to mean a revision of the unequal treaties with Brazil and Argentina that ...”

“... the Agrarian Reform imposed a regime of separated powers that was almost as cumbersome as James Madison’s Constitution. (According to one of the bill’s Communist authors, ‘it was a bourgeois law.’ When grassroots activists complained about the slowness of reform, Arbenz responded: ‘I don’t care! You have to do things right!’) As Grandin ...”

“... a young lecturer, Simon Herzog, teaching an introductory semiology course with examples from the James Bond films – material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his initials, Simon uses his training to perform a Sherlock Holmes-like cold reading on Bayard, who ...”

“... France at the end of the 1950s, opting for complete independence rather than membership of the Franco-African ‘community’ proposed by de Gaulle. By 1960 the others had signed up to his vision: independence in name – and eventually membership of international bodies such as the UN and the Organisation of African Unity – but always in the shadow of ...”