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“... In England during her exile of 1792, Mme de Staël was puzzled as well as offended that Frances Burney, who was then 40, should have felt it necessary to obey her father’s instruction no longer to associate with the adulterous Baronne. Mme de Staël remarked in some puzzlement to Susanna Phillips, Burney’s younger sister: ‘But is a woman under guardianship all her life in your country? It appears to me that your sister is like a girl of 14 ...”

“... knowing he was married, living apart and visiting Charlotte only clandestinely. The problem was Germaine deStaël, with whom Constant had been locked in a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair for some 12 years. How to tell the grand lady of Coppet what he had done – and how to stage manage the scene that was ...”

“... The word excentricité was first used in its figurative sense by Germaine deStaël in her Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1817). Until then, it had been an astronomical and geometrical term. In its new sense, it was an anglicism, expressing ‘a wholly original way of behaving which pays no heed to the opinion of others ...”

“... a great flowering of German intellectual life in the decades either side of 1800, the period when Germaine deStaël called Germany the land of poets and thinkers. Quite a few of the writers came in pairs, whether fathers and sons, like the Forsters and Niebuhrs, or brothers, like the Schlegels and Grimms. Humboldt was ...”

“... leaders. The origins of the current dispensation lie in the 1958 constitution, designed by Charles de Gaulle in the midst of the Algerian war of independence. After liberation, with the military but also constitutional debacle of 1940 in mind, de Gaulle had argued for the creation of a powerful presidency: the head of state ...”

“... up near the rafters. And they owed their moral authority to their best-known member, Maximilien de Robespierre, a previously obscure lawyer from the northern town of Arras whose stringent personal integrity and uncompromising civic virtue had earned him the nickname ‘the Incorruptible’. For better or worse, his political fortunes became increasingly ...”

“... so hot that they decided to take their clothes off and eat their picnic in the nude.The Marquis de Sade set an only slightly more improbable scene in Juliette on the crater’s edge, and Goethe, who ascended Vesuvius in 1787 with his unenthusiastic companion Johann Heinrich Tischbein, recalled his last sight of it from the palace at Portici, the lava ...”

“... us up? Or perhaps it was offering a little consolation to those already suffering from the fin-de-siècle drowning sensation. More serious victims might also try turning to Martin Thom’s careful and deep fathoming of a similar great transition two hundred years ago: the birth of modern nationalism. There is more to be learned on that particular subject ...”

“... as reading such European writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Germaine deStaël and Scott, but denigrated or avoided naming their actual competition: such bestselling sentimental novelists as Kotzebue, de Genlis, Lafontaine and Sophie ...”

“... translation, Interpreting the French Revolution, 1981) and with Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la révolution française (English translation, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1989), Furet demolished the major tenets of the Marxist interpretation, in particular the notion of a class-based, bourgeois revolution as a ‘metaphysical ...”

“... Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic passion; the other, subtlety, irony and world-weary cynicism. One displayed such restless physical energy that contemporaries repeatedly reached for that newly hatched adjective ‘electric’ to describe him; the other was sickly, pallid and had a club foot ...”

“... lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (1897-1962); Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968), the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and stylesetter Madge Garland ...”

“... Felicia Dorothea; Lamb, Lady Caroline; Lee, Harriet; Lee, Sophia; Radcliffe, Ann: Sévigné, Marie de; Seward, Anna; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Worldly, informed and informal, the index is a fitting ...”