“... Truth, 2006), remains at a level of literality that leaves no breathing space for the viewer. When Paul Ricoeur was thinking about the working of metaphor in The Symbolism of Evil, he pointed to the necessary enigma of the thoughtful symbol: it ‘does not conceal any hidden teaching that only needs to be unmasked for the images in which it is clothed to ...”

“... purposes’. The most obvious example was the United Artists production Blockade, an anti-Franco romance starring Henry Fonda as a heroic Spanish peasant, with a script by Hollywood’s most prominent communist, the playwright John Howard Lawson. Strenuously opposed by groups like the Knights of Columbus and the Legion of Decency, as well as the ...”

“... Mitterrand supported the murderous Hutu regime in Rwanda partly because the Tutsi leader, Paul Kagame, was a protégé of Yoweri Museveni, the president of (English-speaking) Uganda; he feared that victory for Kagame would mean an expansion of Anglo-American influence throughout the Great Lakes region. Sure enough, when Kagame won he broke links with ...”

“... for building the collection and organising programmes for schools. This period is well captured in Franco Rosso’s film Dread Beat an’ Blood (1979), which includes interviews, recordings and clips of Johnson at poetry readings as well as footage of street riots and demonstrations. There’s a great clip of Johnson sitting at a table with a group of young ...”

“... language communities, being a French speaker who was also comfortable in Dutch and Marols, a Franco-Dutch dialect associated with Brussels street life. (The made-up exotic languages in the Tintin books are filled with plays on Marols: Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, a comic Arab potentate introduced in Land of Black Gold, gets his name from ...”

“... which it had initially depended. The St Louis World’s Fair staged the Olympics in 1904, and the Franco-British imperial exhibition hosted in 1908. In 1912 the Swedish monarchy, along with the country’s military and bourgeois sports associations, held the Stockholm games as a free-standing event; a similar grouping in Belgium put on the Antwerp games in ...”

“... artists and intellectuals. His friendships with painters and photographers, notably Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Alfred Steiglitz, are preserved in some fine portraits reproduced in English’s book; for their part, the Americans seem to have seen in O’Malley’s uncompromising features the lineaments of the essential revolutionary, a Bazarov of his ...”

“... and Jews may perhaps be seen in their fascinating account of a small principality on the Franco-Spanish frontier, an area that included Rennes-le-Château. Its ruler towards the end of the eighth century was Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne’s peers, a famous figure in epic and of Merovingian royal descent. His principality of Septimania ...”

“... and appreciate. But this isn’t a painting. It’s a photograph taken in 1870, a document of the Franco-Prussian War. Look again and you notice that the bridge itself is missing, destroyed by the conquering Prussian army; its suspension cables dangle in the air. The men who might have made this picture had different priorities. Earlier in the ...”

“... state’s ‘strategy of tension’ from students fired up by the Deleuzo-Guattarian teachings of Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, an autonomist Marxist and celebrated pirate broadcaster. An attractive young woman reminisces enthusiastically about Guattari’s rock-star reception at a French philosophy conference three years earlier, though it seems that ‘that ...”

“... France at the end of the 1950s, opting for complete independence rather than membership of the Franco-African ‘community’ proposed by de Gaulle. By 1960 the others had signed up to his vision: independence in name – and eventually membership of international bodies such as the UN and the Organisation of African Unity – but always in the shadow of ...”

“... work? Here the key term is the anomaly. An anecdote can serve as illustration. One day Franco Moretti and Carlo Ginzburg went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York together. Coming upon Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, depicting a servant-girl drowsing at a table laden with fruit, a wine-glass lying on its side, a painting of Cupid on the wall ...”

“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... had continued to defend papal Rome after Italian unification abandoned the city to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. Shortly afterwards Italian troops walked in. At this point, the military phase of the Risorgimento was over; Italy had been made, but not, as D’Azeglio famously remarked, the Italians. There was at once a perceived gap between what patriots ...”

“... enthusiasm of Sarkozy, who was eager to reassert French imperial prerogatives in North Africa. The Franco-American friendship began with a mishap. Walking up the stairs of the Elysée palace, Clinton stepped out of her shoe; Sarkozy ‘gracefully took my hand and helped me regain my footing’. She sent him a photo of the incident inscribed, ‘I may not be ...”