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“... beef in 1998 after the EU had certified it safe for export, the response was so violent that the French agriculture minister Jean Glavany went on television to complain that ‘Britain has unleashed a torrent of xenophobic hatred.’ From the late Middle Ages, the ability of the English to raise and consume beef was a source of national pride, particularly ...”

“... Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From across the Atlantic came David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, which taught us to separate modern man into the two camps of the inner directed and the other-directed. This way of observing the world suggested that there were no natural laws, that nothing was absolute or determined. Instead ...”

“... yet does so in a jaunty tone that turns somersaults over despair. Such energy is sadly absent from David Roberts’s book The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, though, like Charke, Roberts is more concerned with events behind the scenes and in the auditorium than with those on the stage. Determinedly old-fashioned, this study clearly betrays its ...”

“... be apocryphal – France has far more than 246 cheeses – but it captures a central dilemma in French history. How could such a diverse collection of peoples be forged into a single nation? The question remains pertinent. Despite an apparent unity, regional differences and identities remain strong. There are Breton, Occitan, Basque and Corsican ...”

“... much of the most innovative work has tended to concentrate on the modern period, and especially on French painting from Courbet to Cézanne. Here the writings of T.J. Clark have been particularly influential: starting with two books on Courbet and the art of the Second Republic – Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois (both 1973) – and more ...”

“... course of 20th-century history. Jean-Michel Palmier’s sombre encyclopedia of exile, published in French in 1987 and now translated by David Fernbach, offers seemingly endless evidence of the ways in which exile often punished over and over again those who fled Germany after 1933. One story is symptomatic. Hans ...”

“... of modern France, spectacular anti-Semitic violence coexisted with remarkable successes for French Jewry. As Pierre Birnbaum writes in the introduction to his new book, part of a series called ‘Jewish Lives’, France ‘is virtually the only country in the world, apart from Israel, that has several times chosen as its leader a Jew openly proclaiming ...”

“... But for common sense to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the leaders of the American and French Revolutions, it also needed philosophical justification. Rosenfeld’s story is about this justification, and the intellectual background to Paine’s deceptively straightforward arguments. She shows how the concept actually worked in revolutionary ...”

“... there will be no such easy answer, he is forced to realise, to questions such as whether, if the French were shorter in Flaubert’s day, they needed to be less fat in order to be called ‘fat’. Nor, presumably, will it matter in the slightest if there is not. Barnes’s tone is blithe, because the question, what can a novelist’s life and relics tell ...”

“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country ...”

“... is, in every sense, unapproachable and, for the present, inimitable. More might have approved David Hume’s epitaph on utopianism: ‘All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.’ However, for More this would have ...”

“... One​ of the strangest stories from the Napoleonic Wars involves several hundred soldiers from the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. Some of these men had originally arrived in chains from Africa, and nearly all of them had lived in slavery until the massive, dramatic slave revolt of 1791. In 1801, they were serving under the charismatic, ambitious and independent-minded black governor Toussaint Louverture when Napoleon dispatched a military expedition to reassert full French control over the colony ...”

“... these words in the 1830s, few people in the West doubted that the event he was describing, the French Revolution, counted as among the most important in human history. Some saw it as a deliverance, others as a catastrophe, but they agreed that it had changed everything. For the next 150 years, this verdict stood more or less unchallenged.No longer. The ...”

“... he insisted on the continuing relevance of this struggle by Spanish and British forces to expel French invaders from Spanish soil: the War of Independence, he declared, marked the beginning of a key form of modern warfare – ‘guerrilla’ or ‘partisan’ war, in which combatants refuse to recognise each other’s legitimacy, fight without ...”

“... power, some moments now look like straws in the wind. In late November 2010 the English FA sent David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham to Fifa headquarters in Zurich to lobby on its behalf before the vote for the right to host the 2018 World Cup. Two old Etonians and an alumnus of Chingford County High ...”