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“... by their subjection to another religion. Another outbreak of dualist belief occurred in southern France in the 12th century, probably inspired by the Eastern dualism which the Byzantines had fought: these heretics were known as ‘the pure’ – Cathari – or ‘people of Albi’, Albigensians. It took decades of crusading to wipe out their power, and ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... At the end of the 18th century the main threat to British possession of India seemed to come from France. In Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He had corresponded with Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, and talked of leading the French expeditionary force on to conquer the British possessions in India ...”

“... centuries in English or (during the earlier part of the period when, she points out, England and France formed a single cultural entity) in Anglo-Norman and French. What was going on during the same period in Italy, Germany or Spain falls outside the scope of Cooper’s inquiry. More puzzling is the omission of certain classical Greek and Latin texts ...”

“... was regarded as both wunderkind and irritant. Then she began a series of restless migrations: to France, Britain, San Francisco. She chose to die in Mexico, in a dubious clinic: she had always thought of herself as a permanent exile. Acker approached writing as a technical challenge, setting stringent rules for the writing of her novels. She treated every ...”

“... democracies. The answer: not much. They were willing for their country to sell food to Britain and France – that was about it. The year before, only 5 per cent had supported taking in more refugees. In Kathryn Olmsted’s book The Newspaper Axis, American newspaper owners are shown putting their weight behind isolationism, what William Randolph Hearst ...”

“... promise-crammed with curiosities (one of its chapters is entitled ‘Families, Dogs, Objects’). France is a heated place for psychoanalysis, whose institutional entrenchment is also a state of siege, so the question of Freud’s integrity is especially vexed. Roudinesco is at war with undeclared others who occasionally surface in her intemperate endnotes ...”

“... science and secular philosophy. Everyone agreed that the Enlightenment reached its prime in France in or about the third quarter of the century, and its principal heroes were always referred to as Philosophes. (Philosophy may not have been their strong suit; but the word was left untranslated in deference to the quintessential Frenchness of the whole ...”

“... never solved. One person he particularly impresses is an artist, getting on in years, called Peter Blythe, who was – someone says at a dinner party – ‘pretty famous back in the day’. He is in fact still famous outside the village, busy putting on a new exhibition at a Mayfair gallery, but most locals think him eccentric or ludicrous or dangerous ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... intervention in the economy than we do: the average rate of state subsidy per employed worker in France, Italy and Germany is three to four times higher than it is in Britain. Mrs Thatcher’s solution is to bring their levels down to ours: an alternative solution should be to bring our levels up to theirs. Historically, the ‘problem’ of the British ...”

“... Half a Millennium Later. Was this any kind of site for Utopia, for Acadia, for the founding of New France? Quoyle, protagonist of The Shipping News and newspaper hack in an outport town – a town, that is, which can’t be reached by road – would have sympathised with Cartier. Quoyle is given to thinking about himself in tabloid headlines. He has lived ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... bliss than Thomas Aquinas, in Augustine’s wake, could ever be. Bynum writes in the sphere of Peter Brown’s influence, and is one of the historians who is revising attitudes to Christianity, not from an avowed parti pris (she wasn’t a cradle Catholic and has not converted), but from a desire for intellectual provocation and a brisk contempt for idées ...”