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“... was almost certainly economical with the truth. A rival anthrax vaccine had been produced by Jean-Joseph Toussaint, a young professor at Toulouse Veterinary School, who treated the bacteria with antiseptic to kill them. His approach, in other words, was fundamentally different from Pasteur’s, which was to enfeeble, but not kill, the organisms by ...”

“... a free trade area looked as if they might be more attractive to Bonn, threatening the primacy of Franco-German commercial ties. But it was not the technical opinion of hauts fonctionnaires that decided the issue. Nor was it the personal preference of Mollet himself, who had always favoured European integration but been quite unable to carry his party, the ...”

“... and following three decades of on-off nomadic wanderings – Voltaire bought an estate on the Franco-Swiss border at Ferney. There he would spend the rest of his life – as an improving landlord. ‘Cultivating his garden’ meant for Voltaire draining marshes, bringing disused land back under the plough, planting vines and fruit trees, creating a stud ...”

“... and state – the Enlightenment as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s dialectical thinking. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in the ...”

“... linguistic implications and secrets that it couldn’t see what wasn’t hiding in plain sight. Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2005) recommended an alertness to data and difference, and a certain aloofness from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden ...”

“... that the PR was best handled by himself. One of his most loyal and perceptive friends, the writer Jean Grosjean, whom he first met in a POW camp in 1940, spoke of Malraux’s ‘juvenile mixture of ostentation and pudeur’, the sadness being that the ostentation did its job of masking the pudeur so effectively that few people would have credited him with ...”

“... not actually dumped, however, until 21 September 1794, the day the body of the martyred radical Jean-Paul Marat entered. In 1797 the relatively conservative regime wanted to bring Mirabeau back, but his body was nowhere to be found. (This was not the only lost body: the hero of Verdun in 1792, General Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire, was supposedly sent to the ...”

“... choses dont je suis le maître mais pas volontairement l’acteur]. The interviewer turned to Jean Cocteau and asked for his impressions. Cocteau’s reply is indicative: he seems to be struggling between the epic and post-epic frames of reference that the new mural put in question, hanging onto the possibility of history and tragedy, but glimpsing (his ...”

“... into submission by LSD and hedonism. Paris’s leading artists and intellectuals praise the camp; Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but ...”

“... him when his second wife, June Mansfield Smith, skipped to Europe in 1927 with her lesbian lover Jean Kronski, obliging a broke and humiliated 36-year-old Miller to move back in with his parents in Brooklyn and take a non-writing job. He had yet to set up house in Paris: Crazy Cock is his poorly done passport photo, the first leg of a trip that ended with ...”

“... for Denmark and Sweden. In his 2017 State of the Union speech, the president of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, used the opportunity to restate that the euro is supposed to be the single currency of the entire union and that the status quo entrenches division. Macron appears to seek a different solution – namely, the long-standing French preference ...”

“... The Parti Socialiste, more divided than ever, came fifth in 2017, and La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, lost its initial momentum. In the run-up to the European elections in May, opinion polls showed that the French would vote on the basis of national issues, which persuaded Macron to repeat the two gambles he had taken in 2017: that the only ...”

“... of the ball, sometimes called ‘the kidney’. The game was imported via Le Havre just after the Franco-Prussian War and there were two expat clubs in Paris by the end of the decade, one of which – the Paris Football Club – played both association football and rugby. The Parisian clubs of the 188os were said to emulate the toffish ways of the English ...”

“... 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’. What he meant was that every true Englishman is, at least potentially, an opponent of France ...”

“... such anxieties aren’t new. Book titles such as How Democracy Ends and How Democracies Die echo Jean-François Revel’s gloomy Comment les démocraties finissent, published in 1983. Revel, a shrill conservative, thought Western democracy was doomed, its very openness, pluralism and tolerance of criticism rendering it vulnerable to a less scrupulous ...”