“... culture energised by ideas of male strength and healthful activity, after the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War and the slaughters of the Paris Commune.But Caillebotte did not only paint workers: he painted bourgeois men in plenty, too, and a naked man after his bath. There is something dubious about the idea that, because Caillebotte painted men, he ...”

“... were in cahoots, Belloc added a layer of antisemitism. Like his hero the writer and politician Paul Déroulède, Belloc felt France had been unbearably shamed by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and wanted revenge against the compromisers and financial interests that had undermined army morale. A thoroughgoing ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...”

“... actually dumped, however, until 21 September 1794, the day the body of the martyred radical Jean-Paul Marat entered. In 1797 the relatively conservative regime wanted to bring Mirabeau back, but his body was nowhere to be found. (This was not the only lost body: the hero of Verdun in 1792, General Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire, was supposedly sent to the ...”

“... nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan ...”

“... Madox Brown and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and later of Whistler. Monet came to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro to avoid political persecution; both painted here. There were examples of cross-Channel quasi-pupillage, the most famous being Sickert’s to Degas. On the whole, the British were more drawn to new French ways than vice versa: one ...”

“... its internment camp, built by the French to house fugitives from Spain after the Republic fell to Franco in 1939. A succession of internees went through the camp before it closed on New Year’s Eve 1945. With the Spanish Republicans came International Brigade volunteers who couldn’t get home – Germans, Austrians, Poles. After the Nazi invasion in May ...”

“... around a terrifying pit explosion in which the rescue teams, recruited from both sides of the Franco-German border, serve as a kind of allegory of human solidarity, was a progenitor; and Hollywood played a big part in putting British ‘social consciousness’ drama on the silver screen (The Citadel, the first of Cronin’s novels to be filmed, was an MGM ...”

“... precursors in this regard were the Countess of Castiglione (1837-99), a wealthy and eccentric Franco-Italian narcissist who hired a studio photographer to take scores of secret pictures of her in bizarre poses and costumes, and the Stieglitz associate F. ‘Fred’ Holland Day, whose semi-nude impersonation of Jesus Christ on the Cross – at once ...”

“... I thought, wow!, the Republican worldview is even weirder than I’d imagined: it starts with Franco and then somehow works out from there. But then I realised they must mean the Spanish-American War (McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, the dawn of empire etc), a much more obvious place for such a potted history to start. I’m sure Heilemann and Halperin know ...”

“... the early years of the war and his family’s conservatism. Gavin’s mother thinks that General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and ...”

“... a group of young intellectuals from different disciplines – it included Cardoso from sociology, Paul Singer from economics, José Artur Giannotti from philosophy, Roberto Schwarz from literature – started a seminar on Capital that became a legend, lasting five years and affecting the atmosphere of the Faculty for ten. When the Armed Forces seized power in ...”

“... offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century ...”

“... shoulder and heel injuries dropping a bed on his foot while trying to evict from it a drunk Paul Gascoigne, England’s most important player. At Spain 1982 the Argentine manager César Menotti spent most of his time with a German model and missed morning training sessions, so the team exhausted itself in the heat of the afternoons; the full-back ...”

“... support Brexit, which is going to hit British universities badly. I am the father of a 13-year-old Franco-Portuguese daughter who was born in London and is quintessentially ‘European’. Despite all this, I was not enthused by the Remain message. I am of the view that the EU has shown no interest in fostering solidarity and greater equality. It may be good ...”