“... of the current crisis requires a sense of Haiti’s history. In the 18th century it became France’s most valuable colonial possession, and one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies there has ever been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying ...”

“... virulent anti-semitism and died at the hands of a German firing-squad in 1944 crying: ‘Vive la France’? Marc Bloch was all these things. But curiously, when presenting his credentials in The Strange Defeat, his analysis of the reasons why France collapsed so rapidly and ignominiously in 1940, he added with evident ...”

“... greatly increased the length and expense of sieges. In other ways, too, the expense of warfare rose, for armies grew in size up to tenfold between 1500 and 1700. As wars became dearer and involved a higher proportion of the population, so their effects on society became increasingly significant. Indeed, it is arguable that the demands of warfare helped to ...”

“... relate individual experience to statistical indicators. Such an opportunity was available to June Rose, and unfortunately she has missed it. There has been a need for a new study of Marie Stopes for some time, one which could relate the by now familiar personal biography to her professional work for the Society for Constructive Birth Control. In the Stopes ...”

“... and unpopular, in part because of the neo-liberal reforms Diouf implemented, under pressure from France and the US, in the early 1990s. Wade, a lawyer, emerged as the opposition leader. He was arrested for his part in protests that followed the 1988 election, but he and his Senegalese Democratic Party won the 2000 vote, and Diouf handed over power without ...”

“... those words General Joachim Murat dispersed the Council of Five Hundred in November 1799 and ended France’s first experiment with parliamentary democracy. The scene was the culmination of the 18 Brumaire coup, which enabled Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power. A British cartoon mocked ‘the Corsican crocodile dissolving the council of frogs’, but in ...”

“... work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it ...”

“... mention mistresses, because death in childbirth was common. Richard’s second wife, Isabella of France, died at nineteen; Henry’s first wife, Mary de Bohun, died at 24 after giving birth to her sixth child. The men lived longer, though not by much; plagues, battles and executions took a toll. Castor’s history turns on the acts of men in their ...”

“... the novel together. Zeller was 22 when Artificial Snow came out to terrific critical acclaim in France. One French reviewer called his talent ‘frightening’. Another spoke of ‘a precocious literary success’. Yet another said that Zeller ‘had landed on the literary world like a meteorite’. Another still declared him ‘disarming. More than ...”

“... the domain of memory and feeling’, ‘a full memorial book to the Jewish children deported from France’. Born of ‘an obsession to be sure that these children are not forgotten’, it is compiled by a man whose father fought for France in defence of what he believed to be its commitment to civic equality and, after the ...”

“... in an English translation in 1986) and is almost entirely confined to the history of odours in France. He makes no reference to the pioneering work on early modern smells by Mark Jenner, a British historian at the University of York. But Muchembled’s guiding assumption, that human reactions to smells are not innate, but are shaped by experience, is as ...”

“... bitter English doctor who watches and judges and ekes out her miserable retirement from the Villa Rose next door, and is, in Kitty’s words, an ‘evil old witch’. And yet the hint of magic turns out to be quite misleading, and Kitty’s early advantages are quickly cancelled out. Yes, it’s true, she does know the villa well, but her mother is not so ...”

“... quotes a 1971 letter in response to an invitation to write a political text about conditions in France: I don’t want to publish anything about France. I don’t want to be an intellectual. If I publish something about France, I’ll strike a pose as an intellectual. I am a poet. For ...”

“... Berkeley wondered in 1735 whether ‘credit be not the principal advantage that England hath over France ... [and] over every other country in Europe’.* The years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars present a little more of a problem. Britain was certainly the banker of the various coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet ...”

“... the Mansion House speech, that, like his colleagues, Ll.G. believed British aid to be essential if France was to survive a German attack. This is not a wholly satisfying explanation either of Lloyd George’s speech in July 1911 or of his silence three years later. Why should the despatch of a German gunboat to Agadir, and the failure of the German government ...”