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“... carnal for their 7.50 frs. Corbière, true to form, is missing from the Harvard New History of French Literature, but this official banishment has gone unheeded, for he is back again, almost as good as new, in a parallel-text translation by Christopher Pilling. These translations are a labour of love: heroically complete, decorously literal and slightly ...”

“... in not coming from a country which supplied troops to the occupation. But on 21 August two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, one of whom was an old friend, were picked up; they are still being held. It was also thought that a foreign woman was less likely to be kidnapped than a man, but on 7 September two Italian aid ...”

“... of carrying out reconnaissance for an attack. Paranoia runs high. A member of a newly arrived French camera crew caught in a traffic jam idly took a photograph of the enormous concrete blockade defending the street leading to the Baghdad Hotel, which Iraqis believe to be the CIA headquarters. Iraqi guards immediately arrested the crew and kept them in a ...”

“... was born in 1906. After a chequered career he was killed in Vietnam in 1947 while serving with the French Foreign Legion.The German occupation of Liège during the First World War turned Simenon from a model pupil with an outstanding school record, a choirboy who had thoughts of entering the priesthood, into the kind of petit voyou and petty criminal whom ...”

“... its neighbours was defined less by colonialist ambition than by a conservative desire to keep French and Spanish influence out of the archipelago. This argument is calculated to irritate those like Canny who believe mat the English used religious war to drive their power westwards, through Ireland to the New World, but it convincingly meshes with ...”

“... starts to tell its own story. Blanchot had in mind the récit, one of many possible terms in French, along with conte or nouvelle or histoire, or romance or chronique or historiette, or simply texte, or even prose. The nomenclature is revealing. Unlike the novel, the short story has no self-evident canon, is full of exceptions, and its official history ...”

“... even while presiding over huge camouflage workshops. Dunoyer de Ségonzac, another member of the French camouflage section, was known for still lifes featuring eggs, bottles and cabbages, but not distorted guitars of Picasso’s Cubist kind. Some of his prewar landscapes linger over red-tiled roofs – sun-baked, pleasantly irregular and resting in a ...”

“... One Monday morning in September 1940, Raymond Aron was lying in bed at a camp for Free French soldiers in Aldershot. His roommate, who had arrived the previous afternoon, asked him the time and, when told, replied: ‘Déjà sept heures moins vingt.’ Aron left the room. When he returned, his companion had shot himself ...”

“... War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under ...”

“... to possess the early fruits of Elizabeth’s pedagogical formation: her translation from the French of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the religious poem composed by Marguerite d’Angoulême, the favourite sister of the King of France, which was her 1545 New Year’s gift for Catherine Parr (she was not yet 13!), and which Starkey calls ...”

“... sense of a deliberate, ritualised way of life. These meanings have held fast for centuries. The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1874 that ‘colonisation is a considered act, subject to rules, which can only originate in highly advanced societies. Savages and barbarians sometimes – even often – emigrate [but] only civilised peoples ...”

“... of The Song of Roland is quite a different figure from his historical prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period ...”

“... The trial of the men accused of the attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 is the thirteenth in French history for which an exception will be made. On that evening, terrorists attacked the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, a string of bars in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, and the Bataclan theatre. They killed 130 people, the bloodiest attack on ...”

“... I (his nephew actually was); it was assumed that, like a 19th-century Ottoman sultan, he had a French mother; and Dante placed him among the Noble Pagans in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking ...”

“... who remain are treated as committed rebels. This was the approach of the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria and Americans in Vietnam. (In the Middle East, it’s a strategy that has been employed by the Turkish army in its fight against Kurdish guerrillas: an estimated 3000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed since 1984 and two million people have ...”