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“... Beaumarchais wrote precociously clever letters of protest to the Académic des Sciences and France’s leading cultural review, the Mercure de France, which found in his favour. The affair attracted attention at Court and his future as a watchmaker was assured. It was hardly enough for him. He was taken up by the ...”

“... form, the hobby-horse. It could travel at 12 mph on a good surface. A velocipede craze spread to France, Britain and a few American cities, but fizzled out after two years because the contraption was seen as a rich man’s toy and a danger to pedestrians. The invention of the draisine was followed by half a century of apparently futile attempts to make a ...”

“... sacrificed the Lusitania to draw the United States into the war. Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, were preoccupied with the escalating political crisis over Gallipoli. The absence of British naval escorts for the Lusitania in the war zone reflected the ...”

“... One of the oddities about France’s permanent membership of the Security Council is that its instincts are those of an influential player in the General Assembly. This in turn has to do with its skills in what you might call ‘decline management’ – the steady, negotiated passage from imperialism to mere nation status, with Great Power privileges flapping like ragged ensigns in the wind ...”

“... country, after a century as a dependency of Denmark, became little more than an extension of France. The period of the Crusades, indeed, saw the beginning of something more than the Continent’s genetic aggrandisement: the reach of its culture overcame anything that could be called typically English. This happened elsewhere. ‘England, Sicily and ...”

“... devils, as did the two Indian Army corps, more than a hundred thousand men, stationed in Northern France during the damp and bitter winters of 1915 and 1916. But those troops, too, stood to it and did their duty. They seem to have enjoyed it as well, if the letters they sent home to mothers, fathers and brothers, mostly in the Punjab, are anything to go ...”

“... titles of some of his books. A Second Identity and A Sense of Place express his own commitment to France and sensitivity to French topography, while People and Places and The Police and the People suggest his concern with individuals and their relationships with authority and the places they live in. The ‘second identity’ goes beyond an unsurpassed ...”

“... photograph of the woman comforting her son, who was one of the children on the trip.On 13 October, France’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, said that headscarves are ‘not desirable in our society’.On 14 October, Yves Threard, the deputy editor of Le Figaro, said on the television debate show Le Grand Soir that he ‘hates the Muslim ...”

“... methodologies to the same gigantic, confusing mass of clues. Recently, though, many historians of France seem to have grown tired of this game. For one thing, a generation of wrangling between partisans of the ‘social interpretation’ of the Revolution (enter the bourgeoisie, stage left) and a hardy band of ‘revisionists’ has left the crime scene more ...”

“... could give them a clear advantage in the big races, including the three-week-long Tour de France, the sport’s premier event. How large an advantage is open to dispute: one study puts the increase in ‘peak power output’ for recreational cyclists taking EPO at 12-15 per cent, which translates into an 80 per cent increase in endurance (time riding ...”

“... disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an explanation. And as David Garland points out in Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, on this and many other matters of criminal justice, the United States is not so much a single nation as a federation of 50 states, each of which has substantial ...”

“... Fred Orain, a young engineer who had run the only major film facility in the non-occupied zone of France, and overseen the production of Marcel Carné’s epic Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), liked Tati’s idea for a series of comedy shorts. The two men set up Cady-Films, named after Orain’s dog. Their first feature, Jour de fête (1949), is about the visit ...”

“... such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His book is also part of a more general attempt to rethink the meaning of the Great War and ...”

“... look back to their century of European predominance, they naturally remember their rivalry with France and the battles against the Turks. But their bitterest memories are still directed against ‘the pirate Drake’ and the depradations of the Elizabethan sea-captains. Britain’s real colony in southern Spain was not the unappealing town of Gibraltar but ...”

“... and the consequent Regency Crisis; the premonition of war and the actual wars with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon. But when you read about his career step by step you realise how little his perspective ever widened to become international in scope. At the end of a century in which Britain fought seven wars with ...”