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“... department. These events provide the backdrop for the fictional incidents recounted in The Forger. David Halifax, the protagonist and narrator, is an artist who arrives in Paris in 1939, at the age of 21, after he has been awarded a scholarship by a mysterious body, known only as the Levasseur Committee. The Committee handles his boarding fees and pays for ...”

“... on with them through successive changes of habitat – moving to the United States in 1945, to France in 1955, to Switzerland in 1957 – until 1972.The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers ...”

“... the face of the Madonna looking very like the pictures Raphael or Perugino painted of her. David Blackhourn has produced an exhaustive study of the apparitions of the Madonna in July 1876 in Marpingen, and the turbulent aftermath which embroiled the Army, the Berlin secret police, and the Prussian Parliament. An obscure village of around 1600 ...”

“... the throne as Henry V, to win the Battle of Agincourt, to conquer Normandy and to win the crown of France. It was a providential escape for a king K.B. McFarlane called ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry ...”

“... is silence, or rather, the rest should be another (and conceivably much more memorable) story. David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher is a worthy winner of the W.H. Smith award, the latest of the series of literary prizes awarded to novels published in 1984. In this, his ninth novel, Hughes has written a moral fable, brief, sensational, and hauntingly ...”

“... about a hundred – leads down to the shelter. When the internal resistance in the Ile-de-France called for a general uprising in the third week of August 1944, activists were able to get into the shelter and repurpose it as a clandestine command post during the critical days that followed, making use of the phone system (still operational), which ...”

“... In late​ 2016, David Sedaris attended a piano recital delivered by his longtime partner, Hugh. Hugh had practised with obsessive intensity for many hours a day, but ultimately performed poorly, disappointing himself in front of a room full of his fellow students and their parents. ‘I’ve never seen him so vulnerable,’ Sedaris wrote that night in his diary, excerpted here in a second curated volume of entries, which he has said are a small fraction of the nearly ten million words he has ‘handwritten or typed’ as part of this project since 1977 ...”

“... foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who said that he spoke on behalf of ‘an old country, France, that does not forget . . . all it owes to the freedom fighters that came from the United States of America and everywhere’. Jack Straw took up the theme, declaring: ‘Britain is also a very old country. It was founded in 1066 – by the ...”

“... States. Americans in 1940 were fixated by news and images from across the Atlantic – the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the beginning of the Blitz. Mrs Miniver, shorn of many of the social nuances that British readers found so appealing (or appalling), personified Britain’s resolve under fire. To many Americans, Jan Struther simply was Mrs ...”

“... Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist ...”

“... was the Danube. In 1841, the London Convention – concluded between Russia, Great Britain, France, Austria and Prussia – closed the straits to all warships except those of Turkey’s allies in wartime. The Russians intended this as a concession to the Royal Navy, but they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that ...”

“... be deduced from the exclamations he made on 16 July 1940 concerning the ‘destruction’ of France. ‘Egoism, greed, possessiveness are the poisons which corroded France, and have ended by ruining her. They are the poisons which make the whole Proustian world so futile and so sterile. A grain of charity would have ...”

“... year, when the commission appointed by Jacques Chirac to look into the health of secular values in France delivered its recommendations, no one was surprised to hear that a ban on the wearing of all ostentatious religious symbols in schools, the Muslim hijab or veil above all, was high on the list. The deliberations were really about Islam and its inroads into ...”

“... who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights. The law was controversial not only for its seeming admission of national ‘guilt’, as some critics put it, but also because it appeared to prescribe a ...”

“... Magdalen and the Financial Times, so his uncle took a new young wife. On one visit to the South of France, Michael met an unfamiliar young woman wearing a sun tan and one of Alex’s cream silk shirts. She was Alexa Boycun, a Canadian. Later on, Michael guessed that she had come into his uncle’s view as a sultry model in some pin-up pictures taken by one of ...”