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“... from Les Quatre Cents Coups into Cocteau’s Le Testament d’ Orphée. The synopsis is called Pas de chance, and was first published in Brussels in 1950. A young man comes out of gaol, quarrels with his girlfriend, and kills her by accident. The next day, he feels rather proud of his deed, and wishing to acknowledge it, tries to give himself up. No one ...”

“... defeat by Kennedy, many wrote him off; someone who never did was that shrewdest of judges, Charles deGaulle, who repeatedly startled American visitors by predicting that Nixon was bound to become President, that he had a date with destiny. Aitken records this fact but seems not to understand it. ...”

“... Most of the refugees gathered in the Jungle, a ten-minute drive from the bronze statue of Charles deGaulle and his wife on the place d’Armes in the centre of Calais, have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from ...”

“... monkey to modern woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire caricature of her (it seems to move on the page of Petrine Archer-Straw’s book) was the prototype for his subsequent mobiles.‘I never saw anybody move the way she did. She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman ...”

“... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles deGaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow ...”

“... the conclusion of the war: was it inevitable that it would end in independence (supposedly de Gaulle’s own belief)? To answer these questions we need access to contemporary documents, and the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (created by Louvois in 1668), which had ...”

“... many years later. After all, ‘I was the one who had made them.’‘Julien Keller’ was the nom de guerre of Adolfo Kaminsky, who died in Paris last month aged 97. It was largely thanks to him that the German-occupied zone of wartime France was flooded with false documents. The Occupation authorities were on his trail, but they never suspected that the ...”

“... would give the US the privilege of being indebted to the world ‘free of charge’, as Charles deGaulle later put it, but would work only as long as the US saw maintaining gold convertibility as working in its national interest. Harry Dexter White apparently hadn’t envisaged a scenario in which it ...”

“... retired with his family to his country house at Sulejówek, near Warsaw. From there, prefiguring de Gaulle’s retreat to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, he continued to overshadow and manipulate politics without holding office.But, like de Gaulle in 1958, Piłsudski was eventually sucked out of retirement by his own ...”

“... In​ his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for Churchill. In response De Gaulle warned them ‘never to forget that within him breathes the soul of Pitt ...”

“... Gaullist network, and Mitterrand, then in London, worked closely with Jacques Foccart – later De Gaulle’s spy chief and bête noire of the Left – on the romantic but generally disastrous mission to parachute agents into occupied Europe ahead of the Allied armies in order to liberate French deportees from the camps. So many agents were killed to ...”

“... movement decided to negotiate before he had won.’ But when Nelson Mandela’s ANC and F.W. de Klerk’s ruling white National Party sat down at Kempton Park in April 1993 to begin what was called the Multi-Party Negotiation Process (MPNP), representatives of 24 other parties sat down with them, each with its own agenda. All were highly suspicious of ...”

“... to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many Protestants; that Henri IV wanted every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sundays. The children learnt all this from their primary school textbook, popularly known as the ‘Petit Lavisse’. It offered ...”

“... Olympism,​ the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city ...”

“... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles deGaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the ...”