“... an essay entitled ‘Twenty Minutes from before the War’, Joseph Roth describes how in the 1920s French cinema audiences (and no doubt others elsewhere in Europe) lapped up compilations of pre-1914 documentary footage. They watched endless shots of military parades and goosenecked beauties with hats and fans and all-day hairstyles and floor-length dresses ...”

“... and Peace still hovers over them. Western accounts are more sober, and tend to see things from the French point of view, thanks to the massive amount of available French documentation. They emphasise Napoleon’s mistakes, the effects of winter and the travails of the French soldiers in ...”

“... born in the town of Biel, ‘a very very small metropolis’ on the border between the German and French-speaking areas of Switzerland, the son of a struggling bookbinder and a woman who suffered from mental illness. He left school at 14 to work as a bank clerk, the first of many monotonous jobs in a succession of Swiss towns, and made his first attempts at ...”

“... an operation against the Drohobycz Jews ... Schulz was shot in the head by a Gestapo officer named Karl Günther. ‘The exact location of his grave,’ Ficowski continues, ‘is unknown.’ The book does, however, contain a photograph of the spot in Drohobycz where he was murdered. It shows a couple of shops with flats above, on a suburban street like any ...”

“... Trotskyite ex-Christian Nigerian who has become a revolutionary Muslim and named his son Osama; a French spy with a Resistance past; a disreputable clan of Corsican Gaullists, one of whom is a Freemason known as ‘Monsieur Afrique’; a Moscow-born Israeli businessman who holds Angolan, French and Canadian passports and ...”

“... stark visions of sea and sky – his first steps towards abstraction. Twenty years earlier, in the French port of Gravelines, south of Ostend, Seurat had painted the salt air in brilliant points of colour. Spilliaert saw the coast differently, perhaps because of his obsession with monochrome ink and watercolour drawing, perhaps because of his insomnia, which ...”

“... career as a crusading left-wing critic of liberalism. His earliest writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at Clinton’s ...”

“... a general strike began. Columns of armed workers marched towards the city centre as a leaflet by Karl Liebknecht, a former member of the SPD who was now leader of the militant Spartakus League, urged them to reject ‘parliamentarisation and other rubbish’. The elite army unit that was supposed to ‘restore order’ sat down to discuss politics with the ...”

“... and has been very well translated by George Holoch. The book’s frequent references to French names unknown across the Channel could put English readers off: but curiosity may prevail with a British public which finds itself abruptly transported into the unfamiliar territory of French political life under the ...”

“... contradictory image as lover and scholar continues to deprive her of a prominent place in French history. The old Oxford Companion to French Literature called her ‘both beauty and bluestocking’ (the ‘both’ was obviously supposed to indicate a paradoxical combination). The New Oxford Companion to Literature ...”

“... come from a collection given by a descendant to the Marx scholar Bottigelli, were published in French in 1979, and now reappear in the English in which most of them were written, with a new introduction by Sheila Rowbotham. They are arranged in six parts, each covering a period of variable length but with some unity in terms of the family annals. There are ...”

“... past and present in the 750 lines of Tacitus’ text. A hundred and fifty years before Vico, the French jurist and political theorist François Hotman used Tacitus’ description of the Germans to put some flesh and blood on the inhabitants of early medieval kingdoms, the ancestors of the modern French and Germans. Drawing ...”

“... In Adolph Menzel’s famous Balcony Room (1845), a vivid oil sketch of an empty room, lit from a French window, billowing net curtains hide whatever lies outside. In this case the view rather than the face is to be guessed at. Leafing through the images, you begin to sense that there is a rule: the less you see of what is outside the window and the less you ...”

“... the Grand Duchy of Baden was hoping to consolidate the territorial gains it had made under the French empire and to prove itself worthy of a major role in the new Europe. Duchy officials were alarmed, therefore, when they heard that Baron Karl von Drais, a publicity-seeking eccentric who was employed by the Duchy as a ...”

“... acceded to the ‘gay world’ of aristocratic England, with its impostors and hangers-on, as a French gypsy child smuggled in to secure a succession: as a changeling, no less. Each of the texts is the work of a fine feeler, and Richardson’s was to set patterns of sentiment for later times. And yet he was also superbly plain-spoken, and shrewd. So was ...”