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“... he was born: there, he began the long, slow process by which he abdicated in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing blackened teeth, his joints so crippled by gout that he was unable to sign documents with ...”

“... to England and arranged for him to meet Churchill; her greatest indignation is reserved for the French and British betrayal of Benes: ‘Truly decisive, however, had been the behaviour of England and France. All the rest followed from this.’ She quotes the conviction of the British military attaché in Prague, Colonel Stronge, whose expertise on Czech ...”

“... his major task. As for Elliott’s studies of the court and palaces of the Count-Duke’s master, Philip IV, and of the revolt of the Catalans against their joint regime, they complement rather than compete with the book now under review. There are two obvious reasons for this neglect of a major Spanish statesman. The first is that he failed, while his rival ...”

“... the First World War, the strength or weakness of Bonapartism was usually a potent indicator of how French men and women responded to their nation. Thus Napoleon’s improved reputation in the 1830s (his body was brought back in triumph from St Helena in 1840) pointed towards the success of Louis Napoleon in 1848. As the latter waned in popularity in the 1860s ...”

“... later (‘Christine talked with the pink-suited woman, who had blonde hair elegantly done up in a French roll. She was from Vienna ...’). It’s not a disastrous lapse, but for me it crystallised an unease with the way that what goes on in the stories sometimes comes to seem a consequence of the kind of narratorial voice Atwood has decided in advance to ...”

“... well-known. She was born in Paris in 1887, and studied with some of the greatest figures in French music. It was not until she was nearly forty that she realised her vocation was to be a teacher, and thereafter she taught an astonishing number of prominent musicians. During World War Two, she taught, lectured and conducted in the United States. In ...”

“... is narrated by a Paul Auster figure, a dedicated novelist called Peter Aaron whose c.v. includes a French apprenticeship, a novel called Luna, even (like his creator) a spell teaching at Princeton. He writes about Sachs, who has confided to him the secret of his final, fatal phase, from an admiring, quizzical standpoint not unlike that of Conrad’s Marlow ...”

“... Champs-Elysées in August 1944, was that de Gaulle had succeeded in taking over all parts of the French Resistance movement. He had always led the résistance extérieure: his position changed when the résistance intérieure accepted his leadership. This made it possible for him to establish his authority in Algiers in 1943 and in France the following ...”

“... too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy Americana; discovering the rhythmic loops of Indian music kickstarted his first ...”

“... Road to Empire is following in the steps of some of the best recent work on the British and French Empires. The broad argument that modern empires were co-operative affairs, and that the experience of empire created the modern nation, is, for instance, the main theme of Linda Colley’s Captives (2002). The recognition that all empires are essentially ...”

“... Philip​ Habsburg landed at Southampton on 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England ...”

“... was to be captured or killed.In overall charge, though remaining in Spain, was Parma’s uncle, Philip II. Short, dressed in black, with eyes ‘somewhat red’ and the jutting jaw of a Habsburg, Philip did not look like ‘the most potent monarch of Christendom’, as the 17th-century writer Owen Feltham described ...”

“... events running from her encounter with César in South London, via their driftings in and between French and Italian cities, to the boat which takes them, terminating a two-year limbo, to South America. César and his friends, political exiles ‘wanted, in varying degrees, during this time live and converse evasively, in a mysterious medium of false ...”

“... two-dimensional and defined by his personal and musical contradictions. He disliked Paris, the French people (he thought them ‘arrogant’) and French music in general, and doubted whether the language was suitable to be set to music, yet his Paris Symphony delighted in incorporating fashionable stylistic ...”

“... William’s Angevin successors then created a power of continent-wide importance, an Anglo-French polity that represented these islands’ best effort yet at European integration; but it had fallen apart three times: successively in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. On the two occasions when competent and ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then ...”