“... for other protagonists in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the ...”

“... decided to settle somewhere or other in France. ‘Somewhere or other’ – the place where the French train stopped when mummy announced that she was tired of travelling – turned out to be a small fishing port on ‘the unfashionable’ (i.e. ultra-fashionable) ‘part of the Côte d’Azur’, between Toulon and Marseilles. It was called Sanary and they ...”

“... its population by a million or two. The clear lineal descent of this policy from Japanese and French imperialism, the relentless campaign of lying and falsification by which it was justified, and the coercion and bullying of those brave Americans who resisted it, made the Vietnam War a rather urgent cause for those of us who were essentially politicised ...”

“... here, taken a sharp anti-Soviet and pro-American turn: indeed, for the first time since the French Revolution the intellectuals appear to have no left-wing project of any kind. In Britain, where Marxist intellectuals are accustomed to addressing themselves to the fact of the Labour Party, the debate has taken a more practical, and even ...”

“... prose of a more elegant age; at times it has the air of a classic novel translated from the French. L’amour, in White’s hands, is the subject both of fervid description (as in some vintage piece of erotica) and of worldly and cynical epigrammatic reflection. ‘Love does not obey the laws of amiability,’ we are told, and ‘love is the least ...”

“... England. But Trevor Burridge is a Welshman by birth and a citizen of Canada. He teaches at the French-speaking University of Montreal. One might expect, therefore, that he would bring to English history an outsider’s sense of disbelief, or the cheeky irreverence of an iconoclast. But not so: he is hooked on Clement Attlee. Burridge first became ...”

“... for Britain to thrive within a club which had been based on a carve-up between German industry and French agriculture. The terms, when they came, were worse than could be desired, but they were not markedly different from the ones which Wilson’s Government had been on the way to negotiating. He vehemently and repeatedly denied this, but it can scarcely be ...”

“... love their allies? In the First World War the British authorities quarrelled vigorously with the French, and the attempts of publicists to sentimentalise the Entente Cordiale were a flop. In the Second World War the collapse of France in June 1940 was greeted with sighs of relief. Almost at a stroke, British hopes of salvation were transferred from the ...”

“... They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular ...”

“... for sure who planted the idea of annulling the marriage in Henry’s head. According to Henry, the French ambassador, in the course of negotiations for a marriage between Princess Mary and a member of the French royal family, suggested that Mary might be a bastard because of the doubts surrounding the papal dispensation for ...”

“... the legacy of their ancestors, those who became class conscious as a result of the Industrial and French Revolutions. Polanyi also taught for the WEA in London and for the Oxford extramural department in the 1930s, but according to Rogan, Polanyi’s Damascene conversion occurred when he fled Hungary for Austria following the failed revolution of 1919. He ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... Allan Gray (whose real name was Józef Żmigrod); the German art director Hein Heckroth; and the French and German cinematographers Georges Périnal and Erwin Hillier. The company also had the financial backing of J. Arthur Rank, a wealthy Methodist industrialist from Yorkshire: ‘Not since the time of the Renaissance popes has a group of artists found a ...”

“... the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive weapon. Sometimes Newton’s pleasure seems merely ‘schoolboyish’ – David Alexander’s word – because what Crowninshield would later call the ‘grossness and ...”

“... and file while denouncing the supposed generals. ‘Lions led by donkeys’ – the remark of a French general about British cannon-fodder in Flanders – became the OK vernacular in which to discuss events. (The Donkeys, interestingly enough, was the title of a history of the Somme that formed the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely ...”