“... is pretty much what happened on the morning of 2 July 1816, when Captain de Chaumareys piloted the French frigate Medusa into shallow water near the coast of Senegal – though in his case it was sheer incompetence rather than a deliberate decision. As crew members noted, the waters into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously warm. The captain did not ...”

“... for himself, Hill Barn, on the downs near Mere. Orbach’s description of Hill Barn as ‘slightly French’ is unexceptionable. There is indeed an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another self-designed, but suburban, house of a very different painter, Roger Fry. The inclusion of this remote, largely unrecorded ...”

“... months before she died, she carefully arranged the table for supper in her SoHo loft with candles, French wine, which she snobbishly preferred when living in America, and delicious food that she had bullied me into buying earlier at her local delicatessen, Dean & Deluca. She introduced her favourite subject – love – and we discussed it ...”

“... if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is inflated out of all proportion, that facts buttressing the case are carefully selected, and all the evidence ...”

“... from Jewish communities behind the Iron Curtain and in Algeria with the Americans and the French. Dual loyalty, it emerges, is something of an Israeli speciality. As one anti-Communist supporter of David Ben-Gurion put it, in a reference to leftist immigrants from the Soviet Union: ‘In our relations with the USA ...”

“... make the passage thoroughly European – nothing would be lost by turning it into English or French or German. If one were to choose a page of Hebrew prose from one of the new Israeli novelists such as Meir Shalev and David Grossman, however, one would be more likely to encounter dense constellations of ...”

“... in general showed little interest in the discoveries. The contempt for history of the French intellectuals of the time is often exaggerated; we cannot reproach Voltaire or Montesquieu with being unhistorical. But though they had regard for ‘antiquity’, they had none for ‘antiquities’, which they despised. Montesquieu remarked that all ...”

“... explain: ‘May appears to be educating Georgie,’ said a member of the family. She could speak French and German and had studied constitutional history. None of this made for an exciting court. Surprisingly, there is no mention of that mischievous ‘Ballade à Double Refrain’ (in which courtiers debate whether the King is duller than the Queen, or vice ...”

“... It was ten hours before Lindbergh crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past ...”

“... for burlesque, rather than for the tragic or pastoral mode of the works by Ingres and Manet and David which he takes as his sources. A visit to the Hôtel Salé in the Marais where the Musée Picasso opened a year ago is as exhilarating and depressing as a trip to the Royal Academy exhibition. Here, too, there are masterpieces from the artist’s own ...”

“... to tell the truth, she was not très crazy about.’ What’s a girl who likes to show off her French to do among boys who give their testicles names and aspire to work for the power company? Alison thinks she’s too good for Kyle, the boy next door (‘he looked like a skeleton with a mullet’), but she’s not completely up herself: Was she ...”

“... to her career tell us much more about ourselves than they do about her. We did not hear from David Cameron that she eventually became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party. Before the great banking bust of 2008, which owed much to her policies, he had ditched her and her legacy. No one pointed out either that, despite her well-known convictions and ...”

“... Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson Francis, Morton Bloomfield, E.L. Epstein, John Lyons, Archibald Hill, James Sledd, R.I. McDavid Jr, R.K. O’Cain, Linda Barnes, Josef Vachck and Barbara Strang. So varied as well as distinguished a ...”

“... booby, the flightless rail and the giant tortoise might live happily ever after. The Anglo-French Variable Geometry aircraft project, which had the robust backing of Denis Healey as Secretary of State for Defence, was grounded after a sustained campaign by the tireless Scot. Again, he helped to defeat James Callaghan’s legislation designed to provide ...”

“... didn’t have the flaw and that the inverted centre was imagined. Theodore Champion, the leading French dealer who acquired the stamp at auction in 1931, seems to have kept it for a while among his own rarities. In 1980 it was revealed that the mysterious Vicomte de Rosny bought the stamp from Champion sometime before the Second World War. The Vicomte was an ...”