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“... with associates who seem to have come from a hoary old joke: a Scotsman, a Native American and a French Moroccan. And the set-piece of the film occurs when this group, and a regiment of British soldiers who have long been stuck on one side of a no man’s land, take off after Diana, wipe out the German opposition and liberate a village. There is beer all ...”

“... Frantz Fanon – was indifferent to the project of national sovereignty, preferring to remain a French ‘overseas department’. Fanon committed himself to the grander project of decolonisation in Africa: The Wretched of the Earth was rooted in his experiences in Algeria. But Césaire, who taught Fanon at school, returned to Martinique in 1939 after his ...”

“... its history can also tell us something about the place of Literature in the new televisual age. Patrick ffrench’s title, The Time of Theory, is a reminder that Tel Quel seemed to offer the most prodigious theoretical synthesis of the age, so that the fate, not just of Theory itself – now pronounced dead by some – is at stake here, but also of some of ...”

“... President Poincaré’s declaration, inscribed on a simple marker, set in stone those memories of French resistance to German aggression in World War One that he hoped would be indelible. By 1920, defences along the Verdun salient were mouldering away, the battlefields being pillaged for copper and steel. The sacrifice made by the 3rd Company of the 137th ...”

“... have been explained diplomatically, as the Henrician regime sought to counter the danger of a French-Imperial alliance by negotiating with the German Lutheran princes; and politically, as reformers and conservatives jostled for control of the king’s mind and conscience, Cranmer and Cromwell versus Bishop Stephen Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk. Bernard ...”

“... Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the ...”

“... the then armed forces minister, John Reid. The figures for military executions are puzzling. The French were the most enthusiastic executioners of the Great War, with about six hundred, followed by the Italians, with about five hundred. The Germans were more moderate, with fewer than fifty. Does that translate as fewer desertions and acts of ...”

“... until everyone felt the presence of the devil on the doorstep each day, just waiting his chance. Patrick Wright evokes Cold War stereotypes very concretely, beginning in Fulton, Missouri, where in 1946 Churchill first claimed to discern the curtain that had ‘descended from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. His speech aimed at creating a ...”

“... unfamiliar, in language or habit. In his various book-lined studies there is no sign that great French or Russian literature sat alongside his editions of Hardy, Waugh and his favourite 19th-century Uranian poets. He hated abroad on principle, with the exception of Australia, which he visited in 1961 and celebrated for its wonderful light, architectural ...”

“... world’s most sought-after directors of cinematography. He is most closely associated with the French cinema, having shot nine of Truffaut’s films and seven of Rohmer’s, but recently his Oscar for Malick’s Days of Heaven has encouraged Americans to take a chance on this independent Spaniard who has three times been exiled – from Franco’s ...”

“... talk of this fabulous hybrid called the ‘Euronovel’, of which the next memorable example was Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. The Last World, a short and cheerless fictionalisation of Ovid’s years in exile by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, was a bestseller throughout most of Europe while doing poorly in this country, but any thoughts that this ...”

“... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers ...”

“... on pre-existent economic development for which there is at least some ninth-century evidence? The French monarchy in the tenth century was weak and its economy slow to develop, which supports the politico-economic equation from both ends. But then what of Italy, already the most economically-developed part of Europe, where royal power was almost entirely ...”

“... with pseudo-historical introduction, by Joseph Ritson in 1795, and it was Ritson, inspired by the French Revolution, who first introduced the notion that Robin robbed the rich to give to the poor. It remained for Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to create the figure who underlies the children’s stories and Hollywood epics of modern times. If the development of ...”

“... to study Shakespeare is wrong in principle. The bureaucratic mechanisms certainly matter. The French educational system functions perfectly well with a more centralised choice of set books than we have been used to in Britain, but at least in France the texts are chosen by academic experts and not dictated by ministers. Moreover, good teaching is possible ...”