“... not so fortunate. He fled to the Weevers family’s country house at Monguilhem in the South of France, but, bored with rural life, moved to Toulouse, where he managed to eke out a living teaching and perhaps playing a little: he was hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight. In April 1944 he was caught in a round-up on the streets of Toulouse and taken to ...”

“... me, that all the books and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of ...”

“... to the end of the Napoleonic wars was one of almost unmitigated hostility between England and France. Both nations mobilised an ever-growing war machine in the struggle for European supremacy and hegemony on three continents. Though the subjects of 18th-century state-building and warfare have attracted French and German historians, they have been viewed ...”

“... himself by absconding, and reappearing only years later, an expatriate alcoholic in the South of France. Now the Foreign Office needs to know whether he or the other man was the traitor, and Simon Milson is dispatched to holiday at the suspect’s villa and plumb him. Arrived there, both Milson and the novel itself are sharply and guardedly observant, and if ...”

“... Versailles after reading accounts of the dreadful winter of 1709-10, when the price of bread rose tenfold or more, and millions stood on the brink of starvation while Louis pursued a ruinous war, puts one in mind of Tadeusz Borowski’s comment on the human price paid for the monuments of antiquity: ‘The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues ...”

“... was really in charge, went further, introducing a poll tax to pay for the ongoing skirmishes with France. In 1381, a tax collector went to Fobbing in Essex to demand a silver groat from each inhabitant, and was chased away by an angry crowd. Their resistance provoked the broader revolt against serfdom.Speaking to Sky News, and trying as usual to show us that ...”

“... Carolingian imperial politics and cultivated a network of monasteries that reached into modern-day France, Italy, Austria and Belgium. The curators are keen to emphasise the abbey’s cultural significance and its connections across a continent as yet undivided by nation-states. It’s the individual stories that stand out, however, even if many are filtered ...”

“... in his book Alain Corbin suggests that the marked reluctance of the lower classes in 19th-century France to surrender their ostentatious stench, their stubborn adherence to the sweaty armpit, the public fart and garlic-powered halitosis, was political: a fear, that is, of losing their class authenticity in the wash. Hence their determination to get up the ...”

“... soon followed, to restore Ferdinand VII’s absolute rule, and the allies stood by when the Greeks rose up against their Ottoman rulers. By the time of the 1848 revolutions, ‘holy alliance’ had become an all-purpose signifier for a reactionary cabal. When Marx and Engels searched for a term to describe the enemies of communism, they naturally invented a ...”

“... colour of an object that looks white by day, orange under a street light and pink through rose-tinted spectacles? However, the source of my own moments of disassociation is not, I think, epistemological but a by-product of time spent painting watercolours from life, an activity that has brought with it the habit of judging light and dark while ...”

“... for one day only – in a special supplement mocked up to look like the Sunday edition of France-Soir, a spectacular happening he later described as a ‘leap into the future of today’. A few months before Yuri Gagarin’s first manned orbit of the Earth, Klein showed that an artist didn’t need a rocket to launch him into space. Close by the ...”

“... The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech (aphasia) consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain. This opened the way to a cerebral neurology, which made it possible, over the decades, to ‘map’ the human brain, ascribing specific powers to equally specific ‘centres’ in the brain ...”

“... was no direct water supply to the last house on Back Street Place.Rebecca wanted her daughter Rose to have a different life and sent her to Cardiff to apprentice to a tailor. In 1886, at the age of nineteen, Rose married Henry Williams, a 37-year-old upholsterer, and soon afterwards gave birth to a ...”

“... modern notion of romantic love developed.In Pamphilus, a short Latin comedy probably written in France before 1200, the eponymous hero falls pathetically in love with the virgin Galathea. Instead of attempting to win her heart, he pays an old woman to entrap her and, despite her protestations, rapes her. Early in the story Galathea is quite keen on ...”

“... was the Danube. In 1841, the London Convention – concluded between Russia, Great Britain, France, Austria and Prussia – closed the straits to all warships except those of Turkey’s allies in wartime. The Russians intended this as a concession to the Royal Navy, but they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that ...”