“... chopping sound of the guillotine could be heard in every syllable of the word ‘republic’ … France, finding itself without a master, took to crying in terror, like a blind man who’s lost his cane, or a child who’s lost his nursemaid.But this may or may not be the view of either Flaubert or his narrator. All we have on the page is a paraphrase of ...”

“... the plans of the békés, or planter class, who wanted the colony to look like France) and after Abolition climbed the slopes of the outlying hills, to try to found a community of former slaves in order to break their dependence on rehire at starvation wages on the same old plantations. Here, as in Saint-Pierre, Esternome set to work with ...”

“... in religious life, translated them into French and popularised their story in his Roman de la Rose. One of his characters praises Heloise as peerless among women, but uses their tale all the same to warn men against marriage. A gothic legend recounts that when Heloise was buried beside Abelard, already 21 years dead, his skeleton opened its arms to ...”

“... render people more susceptible to the disease – whatever it was. But the number of the cases rose from tens to hundreds, and then turned to thousands. Within six weeks, ten thousand Hamburgers had died of what nobody could any longer deny was cholera. The City had pursued its policy of silence and inactivity up to the very last moment, afraid to admit ...”

“... of its author, as a non-Jew who doesn’t disturb the hidden remains of anti-semitic sentiment in France, as a catalyst for the idea of all France as Resistance France, as an aid to the useful forgetting of the collaboration of many Frenchmen in the round-up of Jews, and so on. Conley is ...”

“... and many other horrific episodes. Burton also traces the way these effusions of blood seeped into France’s literary imagination, quoting liberally from the goriest passages of de Maistre, Bataille and Maurras. All these pages of blood, fire, dismemberment, gibbets, firing squads and the guillotine leave the reader with the impression of a culture devoted to ...”

“... interiors of pre-World War One buildings. Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there are details of studio practice. The stages whereby a malleable clay face ...”

“... eighty years to go, before we reach the final chapter, with the collapse of the English cause in France in 1450-53. As the first two volumes amply demonstrate, it is a story worth telling in all the detail he has devoted to it. Outside academia, the years and events spanned by these volumes are probably still best known through the near contemporary ...”

“... nations at face value. Of course, historians of England have examined the Plantagenet empire in France and the global empire acquired in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they have rarely considered the implications of such extended territorial acquisitions for England itself. Only recently has the geographical question of England come more clearly into ...”

“... then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had begun in 1180 with his grandfather Philip Augustus, and would reach a climax under ...”

“... Proust, and he counted it his first novel. He took to the life of a wandering reporter, visiting France and Russia, Poland, Albania and Germany for his papers, and writing them up in long series of articles. He drank, and cultivated a casual grand manner. To an accompanying hack he claimed to be writing for ‘posterity’, and when an angry wire from ...”

“... sodomites in London’.)Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me glad I was out there, I mean, for God’s sake, the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken and all you read in the papers is who’s ...”

“... led to its fighting a war in Libya and a successful battle in Ivory Coast, with a little help from France, the former colonial master of Ivory Coast? Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the ‘father of independence’, decreed the name of his country, Côte d’Ivoire, untranslatable and prevailed on the United Nations to agree. Diplomats responded with more enthusiasm ...”

“... of the current crisis requires a sense of Haiti’s history. In the 18th century it became France’s most valuable colonial possession, and one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies there has ever been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying ...”

“... virulent anti-semitism and died at the hands of a German firing-squad in 1944 crying: ‘Vive la France’? Marc Bloch was all these things. But curiously, when presenting his credentials in The Strange Defeat, his analysis of the reasons why France collapsed so rapidly and ignominiously in 1940, he added with evident ...”