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“... a man whom even the meanest of commentators have recognised as being out of the ordinary, General de Gaulle. Since the tenth anniversary of his death in November 1970 is being marked by a spate of books and articles about him, perhaps it is all the more appropriate to reconsider his unusual career. It is true that certain observers have insisted on what ...”

“... the history of France in the last century is embodied in the strange trinity of Philippe Pétain, Charles deGaulle and François Mitterrand. Pétain, born in 1856, was old enough to remember the humiliation of France at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and like other French officers of his period, spent his entire ...”

“... An interesting moment has been reached in de Gaulle studies. That the traditional approach has by no means been exhausted is shown by the biography by Don Cook, a journalist on the Los Angeles Times. It is still possible, and some would say still desirable, to write about the General using the same evidence and the same anecdotes that have already been used by scores of other writers ...”

“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles deGaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...”

“... status as the ‘Victor of Verdun’ and France’s saviour, according to the young Captain Charles deGaulle – wounded and taken prisoner under Pétain’s command – ‘when a choice had to be made between ruin and reason’. In 1945, de Gaulle chose to muffle the ...”

“... to capitulate to the invader. Few of the soldiers and almost none of the sailors recognised Charles deGaulle, an armoured corps colonel temporarily elevated to brigadier general, as their leader. To them, de Gaulle seemed more of a traitor to his fellow officers for ...”

“... his son do, of America’s passionate attachment to Israel involves a slight exaggeration for, as Charles deGaulle once remarked, there are no love affairs between states. Even the love affair between American Jews and Israel is only skin deep: American Jews admire Israel for her body, while Israelis are attracted to ...”

“... At the military academy in Saint-Cyr, which he entered in 1908, Charles deGaulle was known as ‘the great asparagus’. But aside from the fact that he stood six feet four in his socks it was his character that drew attention: he was rebellious yet aloof, sceptical yet sure of himself ...”

“... There is​ a France only thanks to the state,’ Charles deGaulle declared in 1960, ‘and only by the state can France be maintained.’ He spoke these words during the ‘week of the barricades’ in Algiers, when a pied-noir uprising gained significant support in local units of the French army ...”

“... On 18 June​ 1940 Charles deGaulle, speaking from London, where he had arrived the previous day, denounced the new government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which had called for an armistice after the comprehensive defeat of France’s armed forces at the hands of the Wehrmacht ...”

“... the vast American cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The head of the US Commission of Fine Art, Charles Moore, insisted that American cemeteries in France not be designed in the British fashion, in phalanxes of headstones. Instead, they would be a combination of lawns, trees and crosses – parks for the dead and the living. The design of Romagne was handed ...”

“... We went down​ to the beach quite early. The other families staying at St-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in the summer of 1951 were mostly French. Several of them had those early portable radios, chunky wooden boxes covered in rexine (I had just been given a dark-green one for my 12th birthday but had left it at home). We had not been on the beach long before the radios seemed to be squawking louder than usual, and there was a strange commotion around us ...”

“... first was in April 1961, after the Algiers putsch, the generals’ failed coup against Charles deGaulle). ‘France is at war,’ Hollande announced on 16 November, having convened a special congress at the Palace of Versailles to argue that the state of emergency should in due course be written into the ...”

“... philosopher and proto-EU bureaucrat, who himself once played a Simonides of sorts to Charles deGaulle. Unlike Snyder, Kojève gives a good working definition of tyranny ‘in the morally neutral sense of the term’ as what happens when one part of the populace, ‘guided by an authority which the ...”

“... forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles deGaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as ...”