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“... and many other horrific episodes. Burton also traces the way these effusions of blood seeped into France’s literary imagination, quoting liberally from the goriest passages of de Maistre, Bataille and Maurras. All these pages of blood, fire, dismemberment, gibbets, firing squads and the guillotine leave the reader with the impression of a culture devoted to ...”

“... interiors of pre-World War One buildings. Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there are details of studio practice. The stages whereby a malleable clay face ...”

“... eighty years to go, before we reach the final chapter, with the collapse of the English cause in France in 1450-53. As the first two volumes amply demonstrate, it is a story worth telling in all the detail he has devoted to it. Outside academia, the years and events spanned by these volumes are probably still best known through the near contemporary ...”

“... nations at face value. Of course, historians of England have examined the Plantagenet empire in France and the global empire acquired in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they have rarely considered the implications of such extended territorial acquisitions for England itself. Only recently has the geographical question of England come more clearly into ...”

“... then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had begun in 1180 with his grandfather Philip Augustus, and would reach a climax under ...”

“... sodomites in London’.)Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me glad I was out there, I mean, for God’s sake, the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken and all you read in the papers is who’s ...”

“... Proust, and he counted it his first novel. He took to the life of a wandering reporter, visiting France and Russia, Poland, Albania and Germany for his papers, and writing them up in long series of articles. He drank, and cultivated a casual grand manner. To an accompanying hack he claimed to be writing for ‘posterity’, and when an angry wire from ...”

“... led to its fighting a war in Libya and a successful battle in Ivory Coast, with a little help from France, the former colonial master of Ivory Coast? Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the ‘father of independence’, decreed the name of his country, Côte d’Ivoire, untranslatable and prevailed on the United Nations to agree. Diplomats responded with more enthusiasm ...”

“... of the current crisis requires a sense of Haiti’s history. In the 18th century it became France’s most valuable colonial possession, and one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies there has ever been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying ...”

“... greatly increased the length and expense of sieges. In other ways, too, the expense of warfare rose, for armies grew in size up to tenfold between 1500 and 1700. As wars became dearer and involved a higher proportion of the population, so their effects on society became increasingly significant. Indeed, it is arguable that the demands of warfare helped to ...”

“... relate individual experience to statistical indicators. Such an opportunity was available to June Rose, and unfortunately she has missed it. There has been a need for a new study of Marie Stopes for some time, one which could relate the by now familiar personal biography to her professional work for the Society for Constructive Birth Control. In the Stopes ...”

“... virulent anti-semitism and died at the hands of a German firing-squad in 1944 crying: ‘Vive la France’? Marc Bloch was all these things. But curiously, when presenting his credentials in The Strange Defeat, his analysis of the reasons why France collapsed so rapidly and ignominiously in 1940, he added with evident ...”

“... and unpopular, in part because of the neo-liberal reforms Diouf implemented, under pressure from France and the US, in the early 1990s. Wade, a lawyer, emerged as the opposition leader. He was arrested for his part in protests that followed the 1988 election, but he and his Senegalese Democratic Party won the 2000 vote, and Diouf handed over power without ...”

“... those words General Joachim Murat dispersed the Council of Five Hundred in November 1799 and ended France’s first experiment with parliamentary democracy. The scene was the culmination of the 18 Brumaire coup, which enabled Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power. A British cartoon mocked ‘the Corsican crocodile dissolving the council of frogs’, but in ...”

“... work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it ...”