“... Wilson fulminated against the BBC, he contented himself with rather petty gestures – like making Charles Hill its chairman, or giving ITN a key interview and refusing the BBC one – rather than taking more substantive measures to punish the Corporation or bring it to heel. Edward Heath, in contrast, was an image-maker’s nightmare, for he despised the ...”

“... are a long time coming, and when they come, they’re full. For sceptics like Farage, the Palais de l’Europe is a damningly appropriate metaphor for the European project as a whole. The architectural arrangements in the Parliament building in Brussels are more satisfactory. The Parliament spends only one week in every month at the Strasbourg ...”

“... Apaches, as Luc Sante explains in The Other Paris, were propelled to fame by imaginative fin-de-siècle journalists and pamphleteers who felt the city was at risk from ‘an army of crime’. The cause of the arrests, and the sudden celebrity of the apaches, was the discovery of a corpse near Père Lachaise, armed to its rotting teeth with ...”

“... felt strong enough to veto British entry. However you look at it, Young’s verdict runs, ‘de Gaulle without doubt treated Macmillan monstrously.’ That is true, and de Gaulle was repeating the British mistake of greatly overestimating his country’s power. All the same, some of his fears about Britain in ...”

“... for birds and nature, and for Loriod, his wife and musical collaborator.Olivier​ Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a poet. He spent his early years in Grenoble before moving with his family to Paris in 1919, when his father, Pierre, was hired to run a lycée in the Marais. The ...”

“... France, Italy and Britain have persisted with post-imperial ‘pompous behaviour’, but have de facto become the playthings of the great powers – including Putin’s Russia. So what is to be done? Verhofstadt is an unabashed centraliser. He thinks that having a large number of spread-out institutions (with, he might have added, incomprehensible ...”

“... Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers ...”

“... studies. Six years later she published Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the ...”

“... and politics based on the grand tradition of Machiavelli, Smith, Constant, Ricardo, Hegel, Marx, de Tocqueville, Weber and so on. My department had a subsection called Political Theory, which was usually taught by a European scholar and whose range extended from Plato to Marx, but included no Americans. The second factor is that Americans are not naturally ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... as Washington saw it, was to forestall the development of an independent European military force. Charles Bohlen, US ambassador to France in the 1960s, warned the then secretary of state, Dean Rusk, that de Gaulle ‘envisaged the emergence of Europe after the war as a third power centre in the world’. Bohlen was ...”

“... an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far ...”

“... that Britain would be little better than a Trojan horse for American domination of Europe, de Gaulle vetoed the application in January 1963.The following year, Labour came to power in London. Before his death, Hugh Gaitskell had rallied the party to vigorous opposition to British entry into the EEC, arguing that it would mean the end of a thousand ...”

“... thought. In 1999 van Middelaar published the result of his labours in the Netherlands, Politicide: De moord op de politiek in de Franse filosofie (‘Politicide: The Murder of Politics in French Philosophy’). Perhaps advised that this penny-dreadful note might not go down well in ...”

“... his barely cold cadaver. At five o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, 9 October 1967, a las cinco de la tarde, Guevara’s body, on a stretcher strapped to the landing rails of a helicopter, arrived in the Bolivian hill town of Vallegrande. He had been shot some four hours earlier, on the orders – we were to discover much later – of the High Command of ...”