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“... between the democracies, was also of enhanced importance. Thus the British regularly intercepted French diplomatic traffic, with findings that intensified the distrust between the two governments. Diplomacy was now conducted not only between states but by means of innumerable conferences in Europe’s resorts and spas – ‘casino politics’, as Raymond ...”

“... On 30 November 1853, Russian missiles destroyed the Ottoman navy in the Black Sea. The British and French press lamented their countries’ humiliation. In March 1854, both of them joined the Ottoman side.Though the conflict that followed is almost always known as the Crimean War, it was not a war for the liberation of the Crimean peninsula, which Russia had ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... Pasteur and Bernadette Soubirous. Pasteur, the great icon of modern biological science, was a French national hero, a pillar of the academic establishment: the very embodiment of modern, rational, liberal civilisation. Soubirous was a miserably poor, tubercular peasant girl, illiterate, unable to speak anything other than Pyrenean patois, who claimed, in ...”

“... in Paris if states were as nasty as the individuals they sometimes throw up. The poisonous Ango-French diplomacy of recent weeks is merely the exception that proves this rule. It is the whole of Hobbes’s argument that states are not brutish. The law of nations is not the law of the jungle. Because they are not simply men, but machines made in the image of ...”

“... set up, and died of gangrene eight days after being shot), and yet more forensic examples – a French milkman who was able to demonstrate that he had been shot by a drunk (the bullet was still inside him). These stories are bathetic – imaging technology does not produce Pasteur-like patient and physician heroics, and even doctors who used themselves as ...”

“... howler that deserves an erratum slip: on page 200 we learn of a book on feudalism by that great French Medievalist Maurice Bloch. The reference note gets it right.) The book begins with the co-existence of the cyclical and the linear, of repeating phenomena and the march of passing time, and notes the pervasive presence of both in our consciousness and ...”

“... On a wintry Paris day a decade before the French Revolution, the young Manon Phlipon did something daring. Left alone at home one day, she took it into her head to dress up in clothes belonging to the family servant: a ragged blue ankle-length dress with a long, faded red apron, and a rough cotton shawl and hood over the top ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... All rebellions resemble one another, but every revolution is revolutionary in its own way. The French wrote the classic modern script for revolution – utopian, transformative and bloody – but even they recognised that the prologue to their drama had been playing in America since 1776. When viewed from 1789 or 1793, however, the American Revolution looked distinctly unrevolutionary ...”

“... either of a young family or of his own considerable ambition. Why shouldn’t the next Charlot be French? After all, Chaplin’s dandyish sangfroid owed a good deal to the first great French screen comedian, Max Linder, who replaced him at the Essanay film company in 1916 and went on to make several Hollywood ...”

“... object if someone said it about me. No man would. In fact, I might pay them to say it.’ French pornography reached its zenith at the time of the Revolution and Lynn Hunt has no doubt that explicit pornographic lampoons of the French court, and in particular of Marie Antoinette, played an important part in ...”

“... promoted to Major-General, after 21 years of service. In 1807 came his first encounters with the French when, as commander of Bennigsen’s advance guard in Poland, he fought the Grande Armée at Pultusk, Hof and on the first evening at the dreaded Eylau, where he was seriously wounded in the right arm. This apparent setback proved to be of crucial ...”

“... and instead he travelled, with the support of the Spanish crown, to the Americas. Accompanied by a French botanist called Aimé Bonpland, Humboldt left La Coruña in June 1799, stopping briefly in Tenerife before sailing on to Venezuela. There they explored the Orinoco and established its connection with the Amazon river system. They navigated the Orinoco in a ...”

“... sonatas into the small hours and traipsing up mountains in Lederhosen; Louis de Broglie, a young French aristocrat, who studied literature and history before brazenly introducing the notion that solid matter might consist of waves; and Erwin Schrödinger, a dapper Austrian who led a surprisingly bohemian life: openly promiscuous, he sustained a string of ...”