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“... Marmontel, Condorcet, La Harpe... Two familiar images come together here. Eighteenth-century France as a place of refinement, good taste and witty conversation, a haven of the ‘civilisation’ celebrated long ago by Clive Bell. But at the same time the dynamic new France, in which great thinkers shake the foundations ...”

“... is with the place of the arts in the ‘state apparatus’. He assumes rather than argues that France in Louis’s reign was passing through the crucial moment of primary accumulation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He also assumes that the function of spectacle was mystification. It was, in his neat phrase, ‘ideology made ...”

“... the Formalists would say, is conveyed in the selection of poems translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, and in France’s excellent study Poets of Modern Russia, which besides that on Pasternak contains informative essays on Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and the poets of today. A ...”

“... the post-war order which swathes the whole of Northern Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare ...”

“... What I did on my holidays. Twice in the summer I went to France, to La Sauvetat in the South-West and Mourjou in the Auvergne, and once in the spring to Italy, to Santa Cristina in Umbria, not far from Orvieto. Agriculture is, for visitors, a spectator sport. To offer a commentary on land management would be impertinent ...”

“... their appearance in English, is one of the liveliest and most stimulating historians at work in France today – no small praise at a time when Ladurie has just published another monograph, and Braudel is still active. One essay in this collection dates from the year in which Le Goff set the members of his seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes the task of ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... a Pontifical – a book listing the ceremonies only a bishop can perform – that was made in France in the early 1300s. The Pontifical, one of the most perfectly constructed and elegantly articulated manuscripts in the exhibition, uses the text as the basis for a work of art. The Jarrow scribe’s pen unreels the text character by character, line by ...”

“... Thomas Bewick. The move was towards books that were more readable, less monumental, plainer. In France things were different: the mix of type, lithography and etching, as well as woodcutting, resulted in wonders of freely drawn illustration. In 1900, while Pissarro was producing little books of Flaubert stories with wood-engraved frontispieces and ...”

“... and classical myth were discarded as subject matter. The English had a lot to answer for. In France, where the state bought large paintings for the Luxembourg, and for provincial museums and churches, it had always been reasonable to paint big pictures. In England – but more and more in France too – size and ...”

“... work, called Jericho, matches towers he has erected in his 35-acre open-air studio in the South of France. Each of the storeys is a roughly three-metre cube, made from reinforced concrete casts of the corner of a freight container. A door is cut out on each side of each cube: if you step in on the ground floor you can look up, through round, bashed-out ...”

“... seems to the casual eye – and because few are trimmed to size, fewer than would be the case in France. The height of the tide will depend on taste and on what is often still unknown: the size to which an exotic species grown in this country can reach. Dendrologists must often leave knowledge of the potential size of individual trees to their ...”

“... been part of the complex and tangled relation of circumstances which had put Thomas on the road to France as well as to poetry, and this knowledge tinges the poem he sent to Thomas about a month before the latter enlisted in July 1915: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the ...”

“... On 7 July the Tour de France began in Dunkirk. Lance Armstrong, who won in 1999 and 2000, has called it ‘a contest of purposeless suffering’. Cycling more than two thousand miles (many of them mountainous) in 21 days is as brutal a challenge as sport can offer. To meet it the human body is treated like a machine – the engine of the bike/body vehicle ...”

“... are ill-informed and who lack adequate knowledge is to prevent them having more information. In France, by the way, a list of the projects approved by the Cabinet is routinely issued to the press the day after each meeting – and such a practice is normal in many other countries too. Once again, the whole Army’s out of step with our Johnny. In 1981 the ...”