“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... early warning radar coverage over the Pacific. The UK – like every other Nato member apart from France – could now rely on the US to deter Russia from using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. After all, unlike France, we rely on the US to manufacture, service and store our missiles, prepare our targeting software ...”

“... and social change. Recently a number of younger historians – Kathleen Birk, Keith Neilson, and David French in his first book British Economic and Strategic Planning 1905-1915 – have begun to consider some of the key questions of finance and economics. But until now nobody has tried to put all this specialist work together. The last oeuvre de synthèse ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”

“... guerrilla campaigns and worldwide conflict of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between France and Britain and their allies between 1793 and 1815? Or with the destruction of civilian lives and ecosystems in the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 that depopulated a good part of Central Europe? Scholars and writers tend to claim transformational status for ...”

“... of ‘the difficulty of maintaining social distinctions in an impatiently equalising world’. In France and its empire, the logic led to granting full civil rights to religious minorities (first Protestants, then Jews), and then, if only temporarily, to black slaves. It did not do similar things for women but Hunt implicitly takes a stand against those ...”