“... 1983, near the end of his life, he replied: ‘I’ve never clearly understood what was meant in France by the term “modernity” ... But neither do I grasp the kind of problems intended by this term ... While I see clearly that behind what was known as structuralism, there was a certain problem ... I do not understand what kind of problem is common to the ...”

“... as a historian is illustrated in both its indulgent and its astringent modes in the treatment of France and of the Victorian age. The four reprinted essays on French subjects span 25 years – virtually half his lifetime. The study of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is one of the most substantial in the book and the first to convey immediate recognition of ...”

“... worth paying for better orientation. Delacroix was born in 1798. He grew up in post-Revolutionary France and began his training as a painter during Napoleon’s ‘hundred days’. Louis XVIII was on the throne when he showed his first painting in the Salon (The Barque of Dante); Charles X was on the throne when, in 1827–8, he was painting The Death of ...”

“... possible to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a poem which incorporates Adorno’s point:                     Such death, says the painter, is worthwhile – it makes a colour never known. It makes a sight that’s unimagined, says the ...”

“... with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in France when it was translated soon after the war as Le Zéro et l’Infini, and that it was dramatised in 1951 by an American called Sidney Kingsley, with whom Koestler quarrelled, to the point of bringing a lawsuit which Kingsley regrettably won. He does not ...”

“... of public betterment’ and guided by ‘valiant ideas of freedom and democracy’. The journalist Peter Apps credits it with preventing the end of the world and allowing ‘whole generations’ to ‘grow up largely in peace’. In its own promotional material Nato claims to have ‘kept over one billion people safe for 75 years’. It has suddenly become ...”

“... time, and, having seen, to do much about, will continue. Not the least of these, in Britain as in France, West Germany and Scandinavia, is the increasing volatility of the electorate itself. In each of these countries, age, sex and class have become less good predictors of political preference, fewer voters are voting, more of them are switching from party to ...”

“... could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms. We are a long way from Tacitus, upon whom time has taken its revenge by ...”

“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties. Lennon’s jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole ...”

“... By spring 1940 France and Britain had been at war with Germany for more than six months; Belgium was already occupied by the Nazis. On 9 June some fifty divisions Of the German Army under von Rundstedt, a commander so formidable that even Hitler is said to have treated him with considerable respect, struck southwards from Belgium towards Rheims ...”

“... sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise and praise again. Peter Levi, alas, is one of those dwindling, disinterested Arnoldians who can still be uncovered in the home of lost causes. Last year he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in his inaugural lecture announced: ‘Today is the feast of Crispinus and ...”

“... of mentalities – the Dutch word is mentaliteitsgeschiedenis – as currently practised in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Schama focuses neither on events nor on institutions but on a variety of loosely-defined socio-cultural themes. These themes include what he calls ‘moral geography’ – the relation between the culture and its watery ...”

“... of his cabinet. In English it runs: In this school building children from Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and from other countries which are interested in the construction of a unified Europe, will assemble from their early childhood to the time of their university … Educated side by side, untroubled from infancy by ...”

“... argued, explains G.K.’s worst comments. As a student in the 1890s, he had written a poem shaming France for the Dreyfus Affair, and near the end of his life in the 1930s he assailed crackpot Nazi theories of race superiority. But in between came Marconi, which showed, according to Oddie, that it was largely ‘Jews of a particular class that he ...”

“... never rise to the surface.’ With its regulated banking system and extensive welfare provision, France was at first considered to have weathered the economic downturn better than most. Sarkozy delighted in telling the country that it had entered recession later, exited sooner and generally fared better than its European neighbours, ignoring the fact that ...”