“... 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 ...”

“... government and people had joined in identifying the Dutch as England’s principal enemy. Now French absolutism and Popery, which a number of Charles’s advisers seemed eager to import into England, appeared to be the larger threat. Another change in public perception weakened the Government’s hand as the war destroyed the identification of Puritanism ...”

“... decision also points unerringly towards the kind of strong currency policies which have ravaged French and German employment, along with an underlying determination to join a deflationary single European currency at the earliest plausible opportunity. The second key pointer to the kind of government Tony Blair will lead was the appointment of Frank Field as ...”

“... the origins of ethnic and cultural nationalism in German reactions to the universalism of the French Revolution and, specifically, to the alliance of scholars and politicians in post-Napoleonic Germany. The Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (Society for Older German Historical Knowledge), founded in 1819 in Prussia, with contributions ...”

“... It sounds like a modern fairytale: in 1971 two architects, neither of them French, win the most important commission in Paris since the war, the design for the Centre Pompidou, and become famous overnight. The two – a 38-year-old Englishman called Richard Rogers and a 35-year-old Italian called Renzo Piano – design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal braces, with a transparent escalator tube that snakes up the front, and other service tubes, picked out in primary colours, that run up the other sides ...”