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“... intelligence, the bordereau revealed that classified military information was being passed from France to Germany. Wrongly – wilfully, as it turned out – it had been attributed to the young Jewish artillery captain, the rising star at the headquarters of the General Staff of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus. To put it simply, Dreyfus had been framed. In ...”

“... of war than they ever could be on the hills of Wales or in the painting groves of the South of France.      So, although I think that I was a decisive and even an adventurous politician at various stages in my life, and had more sensible views about how to lead a government than many of those who have actually done it, I nonetheless lacked at least ...”

“... treatise, as many suppose, but an aberration. Coinciding with the wave of structuralism in France in the Sixties, Foucault stressed the analysis of discourse rather than social institutions. By his own admission, Foucault in his structuralist phase tended to think of language as autonomous. Discourse organised not only itself but also social practices ...”

“... adversaries.’ News of the hero’s arrest prompted an exodus of ‘like-minded gentlemen’ to France. ‘Flight of the earls,’ the priest comments, always quick to seize on the historical paradigm: ‘the Wild Geese who chose to serve in exile than suffer the alien yoke at home. It is history in a nutshell.’ And indeed it is. But whose ...”

“... in Italy, is gaining ground in Scandinavia and has all but wiped out the social-democratic left in France. Last year, the Alternative für Deutschland overtook the ruling Social Democrats in the polls. It’s easy to see why Orbán said in 2017 that ‘27 years ago here in Central Europe we believed that Europe was our future; today we feel that we are the ...”

“... the domain of memory and feeling’, ‘a full memorial book to the Jewish children deported from France’. Born of ‘an obsession to be sure that these children are not forgotten’, it is compiled by a man whose father fought for France in defence of what he believed to be its commitment to civic equality and, after the ...”

“... famous phrase in a letter Thorpe once sent to Scott announcing: ‘Bunnies can (and will) go to France.’ By, in effect, disregarding the great drama of his life-story Thorpe has succeeded merely in short-changing himself. The more one reflects on those bizarre events – originating with the shooting of a dog by a hit-man on Exmoor over twenty years ago ...”

“... sought to operate as a determinedly assimilationist nation state in the way post-Revolutionary France often tried to do. This does not mean the UK can be regarded merely as a multinational state, or (pace some post-colonialist commentators) as an English-constructed empire. Instead, the UK has most closely resembled what the Columbia political scientist ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... won the Prix Renaudot in 2010, the same year Houellebecq won the Goncourt, and was celebrated in France as another instance of an enfant terrible growing up. Virginie Despentes was born in 1969 and grew up in Nancy, in north-east France. In King Kong Theory, a short half-memoir half-essay published in ...”

“... he argued, treats experience as a congeries of isolated impressions, of the kind once proposed by David Hume.) The praise was sincere, and generous too: a leader of Parisian opinion was offering a leg-up to a young provincial who might easily become his rival. And Camus needed all the help he could get: his paper had folded in 1940, forcing him to seek work ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol. Throughout Ottoman lands, where they had for centuries exercised considerable influence, consular staff from the Allied states departed ...”

“... OZ included an interview with the thirty-something poet, Jean-Jacques Lebel, apparently in jail in France at the time. Fifteen pages of educational material followed under the heading Agit-OZ, including a genealogy of world revolution that beginners could pull out and pin on the wall. It starts with Cromwell and the Diggers (heroes for back-to-the-earth ...”