“... the independence riots of 1945. In response to Philippeville, France’s liberal governor-general, Jacques Soustelle, whom the European community considered an untrustworthy ‘Arab lover’, carried out a campaign of repression in which more than ten thousand Algerians were killed. By over-reacting, Soustelle fell into the FLN’s trap: the army’s brutality ...”

“... country; one of the Dutch judges was the brother of a prewar foreign minister; the French judge, Jacques Rueff, a former deputy governor of the Banque de France, was one of the founders of the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans; a Catholic trade unionist from the Netherlands and a socialist magistrate from Luxembourg rounded out the set.Among the ...”

“... default – ‘the sinister continuity between the 14 years of François Mitterrand and the 12 of Jacques Chirac, united by their talent for winning elections and ruining France’ – by Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian of the centre-right. Rebuttals, vindications, rejoinders, alternatives have proliferated. Baverez looks at first glance like a ...”

“... And her writing can be congested with allusions. Take ‘The Fictions of America’: Jacques Vaché, André Breton, Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her ...”

“... did we.There were nine Ferraris on the track, along with two Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Maserati, a McLaren, an Alfa Romeo, a pair of Audis and a Nissan (if you think that sounds like the odd one out, think again: the Nissan GT-R has a top speed of nearly 200 mph and can go from 0 to 60 in 2.7 seconds). The F430 (top speed 197 mph, and 0 ...”

“... Frigidity. Bernhardt got married only once, disastrously, in 1882: to the hulking and brutish Jacques Damala, a Greek diplomat and actor with a monster morphine addiction – a sort of Missing Link type. While lampooned in Parisian high society as Monsieur Sarah Bernhardt and La Damala des Camélias, he was also rumoured, paradoxically, to be the only man ...”

“... 2014; names being touted include Donald Tusk, Guy Verhofstadt, José Luis Zapatero, Pascal Lamy, Martin Schulz and Barroso himself. If turnout continues to fall as it has since 1979, the winner could end up with the support of less than 10 per cent of European voters. In sum, the European Parliament appears unreformable. A substantial section of Europe’s ...”

“... the stomach: fortunately for the doctor, not so fortunately perhaps for poor 19-year-old Alexis St Martin, a fistula remained which had to be plugged to keep food in, but which also provided an unexcelled window into what happened to food once it disappeared down the throat. So, in what a standard account calls one of the most romantic episodes in the history ...”

“... person were misleading. Monnet is a figure more out of the world of André Mal-raux than of Roger Martin du Gard. The small, dapper Charentais was an international adventurer on a grand scale, juggling finance and politics in a series of spectacular gambles that started with operations in war procurements and bank mergers, and ended with schemes for ...”

“... fuel misperceptions. While he praised the work of Orientalist scholars, including Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, he also sometimes implied that the entire tradition of Orientalist scholarship was a corrupted form of power-knowledge. But then what distinguished an eminent figure like Berque from Lewis or from a vulgar propagandist such as ...”