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“... the novel together. Zeller was 22 when Artificial Snow came out to terrific critical acclaim in France. One French reviewer called his talent ‘frightening’. Another spoke of ‘a precocious literary success’. Yet another said that Zeller ‘had landed on the literary world like a meteorite’. Another still declared him ‘disarming. More than ...”

“... the domain of memory and feeling’, ‘a full memorial book to the Jewish children deported from France’. Born of ‘an obsession to be sure that these children are not forgotten’, it is compiled by a man whose father fought for France in defence of what he believed to be its commitment to civic equality and, after the ...”

“... in an English translation in 1986) and is almost entirely confined to the history of odours in France. He makes no reference to the pioneering work on early modern smells by Mark Jenner, a British historian at the University of York. But Muchembled’s guiding assumption, that human reactions to smells are not innate, but are shaped by experience, is as ...”

“... bitter English doctor who watches and judges and ekes out her miserable retirement from the Villa Rose next door, and is, in Kitty’s words, an ‘evil old witch’. And yet the hint of magic turns out to be quite misleading, and Kitty’s early advantages are quickly cancelled out. Yes, it’s true, she does know the villa well, but her mother is not so ...”

“... quotes a 1971 letter in response to an invitation to write a political text about conditions in France: I don’t want to publish anything about France. I don’t want to be an intellectual. If I publish something about France, I’ll strike a pose as an intellectual. I am a poet. For ...”

“... Berkeley wondered in 1735 whether ‘credit be not the principal advantage that England hath over France ... [and] over every other country in Europe’.* The years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars present a little more of a problem. Britain was certainly the banker of the various coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet ...”

“... the Mansion House speech, that, like his colleagues, Ll.G. believed British aid to be essential if France was to survive a German attack. This is not a wholly satisfying explanation either of Lloyd George’s speech in July 1911 or of his silence three years later. Why should the despatch of a German gunboat to Agadir, and the failure of the German government ...”

“... Was it the young general of the Italian campaigns? Or was it the First Consul who provided France with institutions which had an unexpected longevity? Was it the almighty Emperor who met the Czar at Tilsit? When he abdicated in 1814, he reviewed his guard at Fontainebleau and set out for the humiliation of Elba. He had, in Chateaubriand’s ...”

“... of the iconography of the sublime had led to accusations of fascism, an international row with France and a campaign of direct action by his supporters, the St Just Vigilantes. ‘St Mary le Port, Bristol’ by John Piper (1940). Tintern lost its freshness and was succeeded by the apocalyptic visions of John Martin and the deathly gloom of ...”

“... me, that all the books and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of ...”

“... to the end of the Napoleonic wars was one of almost unmitigated hostility between England and France. Both nations mobilised an ever-growing war machine in the struggle for European supremacy and hegemony on three continents. Though the subjects of 18th-century state-building and warfare have attracted French and German historians, they have been viewed ...”

“... himself by absconding, and reappearing only years later, an expatriate alcoholic in the South of France. Now the Foreign Office needs to know whether he or the other man was the traitor, and Simon Milson is dispatched to holiday at the suspect’s villa and plumb him. Arrived there, both Milson and the novel itself are sharply and guardedly observant, and if ...”

“... Versailles after reading accounts of the dreadful winter of 1709-10, when the price of bread rose tenfold or more, and millions stood on the brink of starvation while Louis pursued a ruinous war, puts one in mind of Tadeusz Borowski’s comment on the human price paid for the monuments of antiquity: ‘The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues ...”

“... was really in charge, went further, introducing a poll tax to pay for the ongoing skirmishes with France. In 1381, a tax collector went to Fobbing in Essex to demand a silver groat from each inhabitant, and was chased away by an angry crowd. Their resistance provoked the broader revolt against serfdom.Speaking to Sky News, and trying as usual to show us that ...”

“... Carolingian imperial politics and cultivated a network of monasteries that reached into modern-day France, Italy, Austria and Belgium. The curators are keen to emphasise the abbey’s cultural significance and its connections across a continent as yet undivided by nation-states. It’s the individual stories that stand out, however, even if many are filtered ...”