“... most of them American but some European (Italians like Piero Manzoni, Nouveaux réalistes in France). Among the indebted are the abstract painters Frank Stella, Robert Ryman and Brice Marden; Minimalists Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Morris; Conceptualists Sol LeWitt, Dorothea Rockburne and Mel Bochner; Post-Minimalists Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman ...”

“... kind can be like looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack, as Randall Lewis and David Reiley – two of an increasing number of economists working for tech firms – put it. There is greater confidence in ‘search ads’: the ads you are shown when you Google something of commercial interest. You are then lower in the funnel: you may be ...”

“... it took her so long to do it. She had a PhD in French literature and was married to a historian of France. She must have heard the wave of post-structuralist theory gathering force well before it hit the West Coast in the early 1970s and washed away any residue of the magical belief that things and their signifiers were united by intrinsic bonds. And a complex ...”

“... not its possible consequences, was published under the title ‘Accidental Heroes: Britain, France and the Libya Operation’. Military performance aside, Nato could claim ‘justifiable credit’: ‘whatever happens next in Libya, there can be no doubting that the allied air operation was critical to saving many innocent lives and removing a ...”

“... A low-income household in Britain is typically £3800 a year worse off than the equivalent one in France, something that makes a world of difference to the way this new inflationary crisis is experienced. Meanwhile, total household wealth (what people own, rather than what they make from wages) rose from three times GDP in the late 1980s to nearly eight times ...”

“... not even in the top 40. A decade later, Girard’s theory is still relatively little known outside France and California. But the theory is not difficult to summarise, for his several books – notably Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and The Scapegoat – develop only a single argument. Social order, he suggests, is ...”

“... were incapable of launching until they had expanded the Luftwaffe and captured forward bases in France and the Low Countries in the following year. Satellite reconnaissance of the kind we now take for granted would have dispelled much of Whitehall’s ignorance in 1939, just as it would have provided unmistakable warning of the surprise attacks launched by ...”

“... risks) of hypnosis and the nature of the hypnotic state, moves elegantly from an account of one of France’s more sordid murders, where the murderess claimed to be acting on hypnotic suggestion, to a thoroughly compelling account of the intellectual, social, political and sexual climate of late 19th-century France, and of ...”

“... where the main influence on population change was death, and to a lesser degree with that of France, where fertility combined with mortality as instruments of change. In an indirect way, this work adds an element of explanation to the problem of why it was in England that the Industrial Revolution took place. Clearly pre-industrial England had a ...”

“... new planet, and these were developed independently by Adams in Cambridge (1845) and Le Verrier in France (1846), the former failing to publish, the latter bemoaning the reluctance of astronomers to test his prediction. If the hypothetical planet was only perfunctorily chased in England, it seems (according to a recent study by Robert W. Smith) that this was ...”

“... said that, for all our uncertainty, we have a pretty good fix on the basic nature of the physical. David Lewis once claimed that ‘the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions is very well understood.’ But this isn’t true. It isn’t true even when we put aside the point that the known phenomena of experience are wholly a matter of the ...”

“... had remained in contact with Picasso, writing a stream of vituperative letters, floating around France in his wake and terrorising his mistresses. When she heard about Claude, Olga transferred ‘the obsessive hatred she had been bearing Dora Maar’ to Gilot and soon this ‘unfortunate creature’ was following the family around the Midi, scratching and ...”

“... that Sinclair’s companion and fellow planter Alexander Ross described as equal to ‘England, France, Spain and Portugal, put together’. The documentation for the notorious deal, held in the capital, has been lost. But we were determined to tease out whatever we could of this history, through meetings, interviews and visits to relevant sites. And of ...”

“... worth going a little into the general question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist ...”