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“... In the extracts from David Stockman’s memoirs published on Monday 14 April by Newsweek, Reagan’s former Budget Director spoke of the mediocrities, charlatans and power-hungry politicos who cluster around the disturbingly vague and incompetent Great Communicator. For them, Stockman said, ‘reality-time’ was the seven o’clock evening news on television ...”

“... who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks that ‘it is a deformity in some “radicals”’ – he has Marx particularly in mind – ‘to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a ...”

“... the United States, were divided up between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many ...”

“... of denying Windsor’s wife the title of Her Royal Highness. The military job given to the Duke in France during the period of the ‘phoney war’ was a mean attempt to ensure that his talents were not used appropriately, while the Governorship of the Bahamas was a ‘bizarre’ appointment, the ‘pettiest and most difficult’ in the British Empire. Even ...”

“... brought him, on recovery, appointment as a brigade major at home, and when the brigade moved to France, his efficiency won him promotion from that plum staff job to a succession of others. In 1918, he was chief of staff of a division and in 1919 a battalion commander and lieutenant-colonel. Good luck also then saw to it that he went straight to the Staff ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... in triumph to Paris, where he pursued a prolific literary career. Le Pouvoir Intellectuel en France was published two years ago and now reaches us as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France. The French title, with its Gallic abstraction, grandiose and menacing at once, promises much; the ...”

“... of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the nuclear danger was real. (The other half was the fact that Iran was ‘the world’s leading sponsor of terror’ – a misleading Israeli contribution to American political discourse.) To be told by the CIA et al ...”

“... centre of the world. Why shouldn’t Havana invoke Washington as Washington invokes Rome? As in France after the Revolution, the identification of the US with ancient Rome was avowedly republican, but it also had to do with empire. France’s empire soon came and went, but America’s has only grown over the years, and ...”

“... in the aftermath of François Hollande’s botched presidency.As well as being remembered in France as the great orator of the left, Jaurès is still seen across the political spectrum as a champion of ‘republican values’. In 2014, on the centenary of his assassination on the eve of the First World War, he was honoured by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ...”

“... death in 1969. That year came two editions of the Memoirs, one edited by Pierre Citron, the other David Cairns’s translation. Critical editions of Berlioz’s other writings, and his Correspondance Générale, are well advanced; critical and analytical scholarship has moved into top gear in Germany, the United States and Britain; the New Berlioz ...”

“... Trying to define Romanticism has always been a typically Romantic activity, especially in France. The word romantisme first appeared in the year of Napoleon’s coronation (1804) and soon began to acquire a large retinue of definitions. Mme de Staël associated it with the misty, melancholy North and declared Romanticism to be primarily an effect of climate ...”

“... matter how apparently unyielding, seems to have gone unmarshalled. Dickens made several trips to France in the early 1860s, and though ‘there is no proof that it was Nelly who took Dickens to France the summer of 1862, or that the reason for her being in France was that she was ...”

“... for the city’s refineries and for export to Holland and Germany as well as to other parts of France. The merchants of Bordeaux were at the heart of the imperial system, providing the credit that facilitated the West India trade and writing the bills of exchange that criss-crossed the Atlantic. They dealt with the region’s celebrated wines as well as ...”