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“... On the surface, no two people in 19th-century France had less in common than Louis Pasteur and Bernadette Soubirous. Pasteur, the great icon of modern biological science, was a French national hero, a pillar of the academic establishment: the very embodiment of modern, rational, liberal civilisation. Soubirous was a miserably poor, tubercular peasant girl, illiterate, unable to speak anything other than Pyrenean patois, who claimed, in February 1858, to have seen a miraculous apparition in a grotto near the village of Lourdes ...”

“... these non-stop flyers mate on the wing is something for which, according to the chief authorities (David Lack and Derek Bromhall), there is no firm evidence. I have watched them for nearly sixty years, at home in North-East Scotland and Westmorland, in the Dolomites and on Gibraltar, and from high up on the Blouberg in Transvaal, and their closest intimacy was ...”

“... instead of the lives of common people is that the real horrors of places like 17th-century France are becoming far less palpable to students. New critical studies of Louis are more likely to speak about the way corpses featured in various discourses than about actual corpses, more about ‘representations of famine’ than famine itself. What was once ...”

“... as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young Michelangelo to the 12th Olympic ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... who believed that there was no real difference between the ‘imperialist’ powers of Britain and France and the Fascist governments of Germany and Italy. The questions remained theoretical, however, until the outbreak of war, when a large section of the American Left immediately denounced the conflict as an imperialist one, and devoted their energies to ...”

“... revolts that threatened to pull apart the Spanish monarchy in the 1640s; the Fronde uprising in France against a hated ministerial regime pursuing an unpopular foreign policy; the British civil wars, followed by the regicide and the destabilising experiment in republicanism; government breakdowns and crippling social unrest in Muscovy, Poland and the ...”

“... as the world’s eighth most stable, extroverted nation (just ahead of Germany), while Hungary and France ranked as the most neurotic and introverted. The fact that the US came out as the nation in the best psychological health should perhaps have raised some doubts in the authors’ minds about their methods. Given the empirical difficulty and political ...”

“... be Swiss). The other, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès from Provence, is not mistrusted outside his native France so much as ignored. Even in France he is more of an intellectual curiosity than an object of reverence. The French Republic has had too many constitutions, too many false gods and too many false dawns to go in for the ...”

“... that day, the Jacobin Bertrand Barère delivered a typically long-winded and overheated speech to France’s National Convention on his favourite subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two ...”

“... In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present under way in France and America. It is intended ‘for the general reader whose eye has been arrested by David’s images and whose mind has been haunted or irritated by their supernal energy and conviction ...”

“... journalism of the period’. O’Brien was particularly indignant that Camus should have preferred France to justice: ‘if France in Algeria was unjust, then it was justice that had to go.’ Yet this is precisely O’Brien’s attitude towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. If Israel is unjust – and even he admits that it ...”

“... for Jews than, for example, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand or of Henry IV of France. Jewish historians must always remind themselves that they are specialised workers in the larger historical field which is concerned with what is sometimes referred to as the ‘host community’. The two books before us, recent publications of the Littman ...”

“... historian, Rolf Engelsing, when he suggested that Britain had produced an industrial revolution, France a political revolution, Germany a mere reading revolution. Is this a true bill, and why should it matter to us? It matters because of the presumed pay-off of all this dreamy introspection in the catastrophes of the 20th century. Impractical poets and windy ...”

“... European superstate has blinded us to the fact that Europe has a superstate already. It is called France. France is not the biggest state in the European Union, nor the most powerful, nor even the most vocal. (It’s the tragedy of the French political classes, Siedentop suggests, to be burdened with ambitions for Europe ...”