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“... At lunch in France last week, with an expert on cheese and its management, the conversation turned to mites. The four teenage girls who were of the party wanted to know what they were getting their teeth into. Cheese mites are too small to be seen easily with the naked eye. Was there a magnifying glass around? There I could help, I had two of the kind of hand lenses botanists and geologists use in the field ...”

“... Lübeck (according to legend, writing his thesis from memory in exercise books which he posted to France), Braudel was not able to publish his Mediterranean till 1949, when he was 47. It was almost immediately recognised as a major work, and before long its author took his place as the head of the French historical Establishment, with a chair at the Collège ...”

“... Full recognition came late to Louise Bourgeois. Born in France in 1911, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moved to New York, where she worked first as a painter and then, after 1940, mainly as a sculptor and assembler of installations. The catalogue of the exhibition of her work at Tate Modern (until 20 January) consists mainly of handsomely illustrated, alphabetically arranged entries by a number of commentators ...”

“... of refugees from Germany that did much to transform intellectual life in New Zealand. Her husband, Peter, worked as a statistician in the Education Department. There were also the Dronkes, the Steiners, the people who founded the chamber music society. There was Karl Popper. Mostly they were reduced to doing jobs nothing like as responsible as those they had ...”

“... Henry was highly conscious of the military achievements of his ancestors, especially Henry V, in France. He itched to fight, even in obese middle age: he had a huge suit of armour made for himself in the year the Great Bible was published, engineered to contain a royal waistline of 54 inches. The costs of war were immense. The French campaign of 1513-14 ...”

“... years ago a rockfall closed the entrance to a cave in the limestone gorge of the Ardèche river in France. In 1994 three speleologists found air wafting from an opening, cleared a way in and discovered caves and grottos running 400 metres or so into the rock. The walls are lined with drawings of animal species – bison, lions, bears, horses, aurochs, deer and ...”

“... The organisers are almost bashful about the exhibition Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-90, which runs at the National Gallery until 28 January. Impressionist pictures are guaranteed to draw a crowd. But the individual painters, the social context, optical science and technique have all, as they point out, been analysed in books ...”

“... untuck or unbutton is a gesture any shirt-wearer can make. Just back from one of the parts of France where members of the English middle class take their summer breaks and have their holiday homes, I have no memories of big florals: no surfboards, boats, fish and dancing girls (the pin-up on Tony Blair’s cuff was surely an anomaly), but the British on ...”

“... transcriptions of Old World scenery.I read Roderick Hudson on the train that took me down through France to the Auvergne, with a watercolour box and binoculars, the paraphernalia of two amateur pursuits likely to expose one to curiosity or mild derision, in my luggage. Bird watching, which is becoming more common, draws fewer curious glances than painting in ...”

“... to the tunnel below. Meanwhile our Slovenian friends were questioned about their crossing into France from Belgium, which hadn’t been properly registered in their passports. When we got to the tunnel, it was just as I expected. I was simply there, gazing into the grey distance. Even if I had brought a contraband folding bicycle, it would have been ...”

“... Malta, Norway and Spain – did they remain in opposition. In 11 of these 14 countries, including France, Germany, Italy and the UK, the heads of government came from social democratic parties. The sheer scale of this success was unprecedented: never before had Europe’s four leading democracies been governed at one and the same time by social ...”

“... the ‘period eye’, which might have allowed comparisons or contrasts to be made with Italy or France. Indeed, a casual observation about a specifically ‘Spanish taste for evoking the real world through specific details’ suggests a curious lack of interest on the author’s part in the paintings of Quattrocento Italy. Unlike Italy and the ...”

“... who cannot make two lines meet?’ asked one of his teachers at the AA. But new tutors – notably Peter Smithson – found more to respect. Rogers began to get his ideas across. By 1958, a report would admit he had ‘a genuine interest in and feeling for architecture’, even if it noticed a lack of the ‘intellectual equipment to translate these feelings ...”

“... of light and weather to be set down swiftly. An oil sketch (one of Corot’s made in the South of France, for example) can record heat, strong shadow and bright light. Watercolour, used strictly as a medium for painting (coloured drawings such as Rowlandson’s, in which pen-line holds the form, are a different matter), comes into its own at dusk or at ...”

“... arches and pillared halls. If you haven’t met its demands, you can feel like human litter. In France they are clear about that – I remember being moved along by the wardens when we sat on the grass at Versailles. On the other hand, the back, arms and shoulders of young human beings can be so beautiful that were I to have the power to insist that people ...”