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“... tenth of that owned by the local duke, a Tory, but they intended to be his political equals. They rose financially and socially through service to the army and the crown, at home and abroad. One Grey became private secretary to Prince Albert and then to Queen Victoria. Charles Grey’s father – the first Earl Grey – was a tough, blunt soldier who did well ...”

“... warranties, while new societies of ‘spiritists’, particularly strong in America, Britain and France, studied reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Amateur chemists of the immortal, they analysed ethereal matter and conjured up elements like the périsprit, which, as Kselman observes, seems to have drifted across generations and into the minds of ...”

“... brought the mills of Lancashire to a halt for the best part of two years. As monumental New Delhi rose in Lutyens’s imperial splendour, Anglo-Indians anxiously decamped to the suburbs of London. The fate of the Empire mirrored the fate of the treaties. Despite the impressive appearance of permanence, every one of the major buttresses of that high-vaulted ...”

“... long-standing foe, the French royal house of Valois. On this basis, a skein of links between France and Scotland endured among the nobility and higher clergy, symbolised visually by Scotland’s consistent rejection of the Perpendicular architectural forms developed in England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War between Plantagenet and ...”

“... before launching successive sections entitled ‘The European Acceleration’ (mostly Britain and France), ‘The Circle Widens’ (America, Japan, India, Latin America, Africa) and ‘Towards World Literature’. This structure implies passage through the generic equivalent of a population bottleneck in Europe in the 18th century, during which the novel took ...”

“... the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform France’s perennially disastrous finances. Law quickly became the second most important man in the country, and cobbled together a reform scheme that had all the solidity and common sense of an Icelandic hedge fund prospectus; it ambitiously tethered government ...”

“... I was, minding my own business, when suddenly the man burst into flames ... The table rose from the floor before my very eyes ... The lady went into a trance and found herself reliving her earlier life as a servant to the King of France ... The spoon bent without the boy so much as touching it ...’ etc. Next ...”

“... Catholic churches were already too well established under the jealous patronage of Russia and France for Protestantism to have any impact. Cardinal Newman’s eccentric brother Francis – classicist, anti-vaxxer and pioneer vegetarian – was one of the many young idealists who failed to make a single convert in Syria. He returned home gloomily ...”

“... branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have cut the cake and what we would have called it if the Tudors had reigned, say, from 1450 to 1700. For Bindoff, it ...”

“... her introduction as an urbane, amusing character. This new translation by Gina Greco and Christine Rose is the first to appear in English of the whole text. The editors have spent years on their translation, tracking down the names of animals, foods, plants, agricultural implements, kitchen gadgets and medicines, and have judged the register ...”

“... but Stendhal would probably have changed that. He considered another, worse possibility: The Rose of the North. ‘A flat and pretentious title,’ he ruefully commented, ‘which seemed fine to me yesterday.’ The work was written in 1837, after Stendhal had abandoned Lucien Leuwen, before he found La Chartreuse. It offers us some hundred pages of the ...”

“... Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it ...”

“... the Polish nobility in Galicia triggered a series of massacres, as Polish and Ruthenian peasants rose up against their landlords. Hunger riots were reported in Germany and France. During the following year, deepening political and confessional tensions in Switzerland culminated in the Sonderbund War, in the course of which ...”

“... Louis Philippe out of the Tuileries Palace, the Paris crowd stormed the Chamber of Deputies, where France’s political elite was fighting over the remnants of the July Monarchy. A series of ministers had been trying to form a provisional government under the regency of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the former king’s daughter-in-law, who was sitting calmly in ...”

“... in interpreting the myth itself and drawing out what Piaf meant – and still means – to France and to her wider audience. The final three chapters are about her posthumous meanings and her adoption by everyone from François Hollande to Lady Gaga. Looseley, who teaches contemporary French culture at the University of Leeds, is too much given to ...”