“... Between them​ France and Britain had more than 450 million imperial subjects at the start of World War One. Germany, despite the geographical size of its African acquisitions, had fewer than 20 million. All three empires threw colonial manpower into the conflict, in Africa, Anatolia, the Middle East and Europe. In Britain, as in Germany, there was strong resistance to the idea of African contingents bearing arms on European soil ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... for Maff said that agriculture was costing every British taxpayer £4 a week. After Germany and France, the UK makes the largest annual contribution to the Common Agricultural Policy, and yet, even before the great rise in the strength of the pound, British farmers’ production costs were higher than anywhere else in the EU, to a large extent because of ...”

“... of the nobility. Henry VIII was greeted by More, as More’s friends abroad greeted Francis I of France and the Emperor Charles V, as a Humanist prince who would reform Church and commonwealth. Hope soon turned to disillusionment, disillusionment to fear. The King had the cowardice of the bully and a proneness to suspicion which his advisers strove to turn ...”

“... on Horner’s first grave and another similar cross for his brother, who was also killed in France and is buried outside the east end of the church with a tombstone by Eric Gill. Gill did the memorial to Raymond Asquith, too, a lettered inscription that blends into the tower wall opposite the Horner tomb. Everywhere is palpably Edwardian and Arts and ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame): Hitler had just invaded Poland. Two days later, France declared war on Germany. In 1946, backed by a socialist mayor, Raymond Picaud, and funded by the Confédération Générale du Travail (which still sits on the board, to little effect) and local unions – restaurateurs, hoteliers and even bakers – and ...”

“... I recall discovering, in a bundle belonging to my wife’s family in the Corrèze in Central France, a letter dated July 1789 which talked of the weather, the forthcoming harvest and various family illnesses, and never once mentioned events far away in Paris. In Gerhardie’s novel Futility, the Revolution of 1917 (which he had witnessed) is merely a ...”

“... United Kingdom, Madagascar) and archipelagic states (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines). David Bosco opens his account of ocean governance with the question of the Senkaku Islands, eight uninhabited rocks between Taiwan and Okinawa which are in themselves no good to anyone but are nonetheless bitterly contested. Under US occupation from 1945, when ...”

“... conference on refugees in 1936 and careful to make no commitments at a similar conference in France two years later. A pattern began to emerge in the Irish handling of the refugee problem. The Department of Justice was inflexible and would only bend under direct pressure from the Taoiseach’s office, and the Taoiseach’s office dealt only with cases ...”

“... he first read Marx. A Francophile in his adolescence, Stedman Jones had worked in Paris for Agence France-Presse before starting at Oxford. Back in England, he fell in with the group coalescing around the New Left Review, and by 1965 was on its editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and ...”

“... fortunate’ that the ‘poets who got badly involved in the war were all infantrymen in France’. Living in an environment where around half of one’s friends were slaughtered by snipers, mortars and machine guns is an odd form of good fortune; but by describing it this way Graves acknowledged how deeply being a part of mechanised and impersonal ...”