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“... power, some moments now look like straws in the wind. In late November 2010 the English FA sent David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham to Fifa headquarters in Zurich to lobby on its behalf before the vote for the right to host the 2018 World Cup. Two old Etonians and an alumnus of Chingford County High ...”

“... The Americans have ‘American exceptionalism’. The French have ‘l’exception française’. The Germans have ‘der deutsche Sonderweg’. The English, on the other hand, have no equivalent catchphrase: it seems they take their exceptionality so much for granted that they don’t even bother putting a name to it ...”

“... The French, a people normally not plagued by a lack of national pride, revere very few of their past leaders. Consider the following list: Richelieu, Louis XIV, Robespierre, Napoleon, Clemenceau, De Gaulle. Which of them enjoys anything like the adoration from their countrymen that Americans give to the secular canon of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy? Napoleon himself is today remembered as a vainglorious tyrant who squandered his achievements ...”

“... of his time, Blake was not alone in believing that the last Judgment was nigh, and that the French Revolution was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Revelation. One example is William Sharp, known alike for his skill as an engraver and his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince ...”

“... August. By the end of September, 300,000 of them were dead, more than a fifth of the 1.3 million French soldiers who would die during the years 1914-18. By late November, the number of dead, wounded and missing stood at nearly 600,000. The story of what happened next has been told in different ways: in terms of ...”

“... It used to be that historians searched for the causes of the French Revolution in the manner of detectives on the track of a master criminal. Over the years, unfortunately, they dragged such a bewildering variety of suspects into the historical station-house that one would be forgiven for thinking a posse of bumbling Inspector Lestrades had been let loose in the archives ...”

“... caused your sufferings … To escape bondage, a great revolution is necessary.’The concern in French intellectual life with the status of women predated the Enlightenment. In 1405, Christine de Pizan mounted a defence of women’s historical achievements in The Book of the City of Ladies. In 1673, François Poulain de la Barre, a Catholic priest and ...”

“... the coup’s success was mostly greeted with relief. After ten years of revolutionary chaos, the French people wanted a strong government and the man who had conquered Italy and Egypt before he turned thirty seemed the ideal candidate to restore order. His success has cast a long shadow over French politics.There was an ...”

“... conditions), along with 125 million pounds of tobacco and 40 million pounds of tea. But the French state imposed heavy-handed restrictions on the market. Notably, until 1759 it banned imports of cheap, brightly coloured Indian calico cloth so as to protect domestic producers, and granted a monopoly over tobacco sales to the huge, semi-private ‘tax ...”

“... culture, and its distance from our own. On receiving his commission as a second lieutenant in the French Army in 1785, the young Napoleon Bonaparte embarked not on the conquest of Europe, but on seven years of mostly undemanding peacetime soldiering, interrupted by long and frequent leaves of absence. Friendless and penurious, he did not devote his ample ...”

“... well worth detours however. First visit, so all is unfamiliar. Much more to see than expected. French Revolution rooms specially impressive. The tricolor that surely inspired Pierre-Jean Jouve’s poem, A une soie: ‘Propice et large soie étalée sans un pli ... Et suave de trois cruautés arrondies.’ – ‘Et le drapeau disait: Liberté ou la ...”

“... trust their officers to carry out orders if they were asked to use firearms against ordinary French citizens. Was France on the verge of another revolution? The gilets jaunes invoked the revolution of 1789 time and again. Protesters wore the red Phrygian cap, sang the Marseillaise and staged mock guillotine executions of Macron. The rumoured hesitation ...”

“... Until then there had been several large volumes on Les Armées Révolutionnaires (written in French), a book of essays (also in French) and a collection of book reviews written anonymously for the TLS. Subsequently, he has become one of the most prolific historians writing in English: 11 books in 14 years, several ...”

“... Foot and Denis Healey will therefore have to fight the next election on a programme closer to the French Communist Party’s than to that of any other important working-class party in the Western world. Labour has been losing support since the early Fifties. The gap between its voters and its activists has been widening since the early Seventies. Between ...”

“... His fame rests on Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only French plays which his stage-struck century bequeathed to the international repertoire. But his achievement has been adulterated, for ‘Beaumarchais’ has long been the brand-name of a product variously reprocessed by Mozart, Rossini and the score or so ...”