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“... the price of survival. The mythology of the red flag has been replaced by the iconography of the rose in both France and Britain, while the Italian socialists settled on the carnation as the symbol of their reincarnation. A common interpretation of what has happened is shared by the Old Left and the New Right. The ...”

“... the narrator really know of Albertine if for him depth is just a name for mystery?Jacqueline’s Rose’s novel Albertine (2001) doesn’t answer this question but it does answer the previous one, and it takes the sentence about Albertine and her non-understanding of the narrator’s pages as one of its epigraphs. It shows us Albertine’s depths, or rather ...”

“... intelligence, the bordereau revealed that classified military information was being passed from France to Germany. Wrongly – wilfully, as it turned out – it had been attributed to the young Jewish artillery captain, the rising star at the headquarters of the General Staff of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus. To put it simply, Dreyfus had been framed. In ...”

“... by steamship from its native America to Europe on infected vine cuttings, was first discovered in France by the Vaucluse Agricultural Society on a scientific field trip to the Rhône Valley in 1868. Félix Sahut, Gaston Bazille and Jules-Emile planchon were looking for the cause of the mysterious disease which had begun to kill vines in the south of ...”

“... they die, but good Americans have always been few in number, so for a long time their impact on France was slight even when they were dead. ‘Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture ...?’ asked Baudelaire, perhaps echoing Tocqueville, with his premonition that the wonders and vulgarities of democracy in ...”

“... when vocal again, partly because of class resentments. When eventually found unfit to return to France because of the asthma Rivers has insisted on reporting, Prior is ashamed of being let off, despite his new union with a munitions factory girl to whom he’d like to tell the truth about the trenches but can’t. Rivers also acts beyond the call of duty in ...”

“... How​ does a comic writer describe a world that has stopped being funny? What to say when the system you satirise is swept away, when parts of the population are killed, when the survivors become refugees, drifting away en masse but it’s unclear where to? Teffi was faced with these questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war ...”

“... If Christine Brooke-Rose had stayed in Oxford, instead of migrating to France, she might have been rather like Helen Gardner. Her new book is written with a crispness and a briskness which at once evokes a certain atmosphere: a highly intelligent unresponsiveness to theory, a fear of subjectivity (she even recalls, with obvious relish, her Oxford tutor’s phrase for mere criticism, ‘personal effusions ...”

“... origins of his name, at which point he bursts into life: ‘We were persecuted Protestants from France who fled in fear of our lives and were welcomed in by England.’ As with Nicolas Sarkozy, who never lets his part-Jewish ancestry or Carla Bruni’s status as an Italian immigrant stand in the way of his anti-immigration policies, Farage doesn’t ...”

“... In August 1914, France mobilised jubilantly. ‘La Patrie’ was in danger and men and women of all classes and stations rallied to its defence. Florid voices on the clerical, aristocratic, conservative right defined patriotism grandly, as a mystical religion rooted in the land. Others, more worldly but no less exalted, were clear that patriotism was a hard-won secular tradition under constant threat from socialism, collectivism, anarchism, internationalism, individualism and now, most urgently, from the latest migration of Teutonic barbarism ...”

“... Christine Brooke-Rose, being in her eighties and suffering many intractable illnesses and disabilities, recognises that her life must be near its end. Since her retirement from the University of Paris (Vincennes) she has lived alone in a village near Avignon. Being well acquainted with illness, she has offered as her main reason for choosing to spend her old age in France the conviction that the French health services are far superior to the British, an opinion she has not had occasion to revise ...”

“... from the camp of the so-called Anglo-Saxon model is that people have too easy a time over there in France. Social safety nets, protection of small businesses, quality food, pampered workers, productive yet lovely countryside, cheap dentists: you name it, it’s got to stop. But those to whom these errors look rather attractive will be confused by Lydie ...”

“... an arm around his neck, but More told his son-in-law: ‘If my head would win him a castle in France … it would not fail to go.’ Charles Brandon fought in showy campaigns to recover those bits of France Henry thought he owned, so he must have felt the truth of More’s words in every shuddering vertebra. He was one ...”

“... social problems of the period. The confused fighting in the Hundred Years War between England and France offered adventurers eager for gain a fine apprenticeship in fighting and plundering, and spread freebooter companies across much of the French kingdom, reducing rich provinces to economic ruin in the course of the 1340s, 1350s and 1360s. Italy offered even ...”

“... won them to confidence, excitement and triumph. By the end of the day-long showing, the audience rose in a comparable mood of exaltation as the screen opened out onto an immense triple montage of red, white and blue, with a long last image of exploding galaxies. This is Napoleon before he had his hair cut à la Titus, before he returned to Paris after ...”