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“... 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. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...”

“... du X’, ‘un flingue’). Some of the English substitutes (‘bae’, ‘on fleek’) in Frank Wynne’s translation already feel dated, though I’m not sure anyone has ever snorted ‘gutter glitter’ or smoked a ‘cancer stick’, even in Paris six years ago. But in the end, this doesn’t really matter: the moment is caught whenever a ...”

“... This is the third of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and in it, as in the previous two, his hero yearns, mostly in vain, for men and women who are strangers to each other to reach out spontaneously and touch each other: for men to be able to dispense with verbal courtship, for women to put aside cultural restraint, discrimination and any desire to be seduced; and for the sexes to spend as much time as they can cope with in mutually rewarding fornication ...”

“... In​ 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary ...”

“... writes: ‘Yes, I’d like that very much. That really would be something to look forward to.’ Frank was already weakened and wasted by throat cancer, but my suggestion that we go to watch some cricket at Fenner’s did seem genuinely to appeal to him. There wasn’t much to look forward to by this point. On the appointed day the weather was kind, and ...”

“... Enric Marco​ , an energetic pensioner with time on his hands, joined the Amical de Mauthausen, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, in 1999. To the elderly Republican deportados and their heirs who ran the outfit on a shoestring from an attic in Barcelona, he soon came to seem a useful person to have around. Under Franco the Amical had been a clandestine organisation providing legal advice and practical support ...”

“... The life of Claude Lanzmann, Claude Lanzmann declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’. Self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian, but its truth in this case can hardly be denied. He has lived on a grand scale. A teenage fighter in the Resistance, he became Sartre’s protégé in the early 1950s as an editor at Les Temps modernes ...”

“... very close to Klein, and his wife was a patient of hers. Readers of this journal may recall Wynne Godley’s complaint that his analyst, Masud Khan, was himself a patient and confidant of Winnicott – Robert Rodman even conjectures a homosexual attraction – all the time he was treating Godley in such extraordinary ways.* And Godley’s stepdaughter ...”

“... the famously taciturn Mende tribe); in a cryptic rubric on the front cover (‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – one of Karl’s recent ones – achieves an almost Japanese inscrutability and aesthetic poise); in the choice of a cover picture (once, for the Christmas Issue, Karl chose the photograph of an old Jew in the Lodz Ghetto peering through a ...”

“... any objection to seeing a Pakistani analyst. As I left he said, very kindly, ‘You have been very frank with me,’ adding: ‘I think you were a lonely child.’I arranged an appointment with Masud Khan from my office in the Treasury, where I was now an economic adviser, and he met me at the foot of the stairs leading to his attic apartment in Harley ...”