Quotes from Jonathan Fenby

I respect only those who stand up to me, but I find such people intolerable.

They assure love from the beginning of life to its conclusion and, in the end, they govern our existence.

In 1945, Yvonne established an Anne de Gaulle Foundation for Down's syndrome children in a château bought for the purpose outside Paris, and, after his daughter's death in 1948, de Gaulle kept her framed photograph with him.

You people sit in your yamen [headquarters], and your horizon is your window sill,' he went on. `You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you. You might lose face and, what's more, some one might lose his head. You've retreated into your intellectual rat holes, having exposed only a posterior of vanity. Goddamn it, sir, you've all become insufferably stupid!

Though the issue of collaboration, whether active or passive, remains a highly emotive matter in France, the fact was that, in the summer of 1940, most people in the unoccupied zone accepted the armistice.

If present reality contradicts such a vision, if they prefer to reject economic modernisation in favour of defence of tradition, if their nation has fallen behind its neighbour across the Rhine, if polls in the summer of 2014 showed that 90 per cent of respondents did not believe their elected president could handle the problems facing them, this leaves them feeling deprived of what they believe should be theirs by historic right and opens them to the temptation of extremist illusions.

According to de Gaulle's account, Blum assured him of his interest in the soldier's ideas. 'But you fought against them,' his visitor observed. 'One changes one's point of view when one becomes head of the government,' came the reply.

the US continued to recognise Vichy and the Free French were reduced to operating in the US out of the office of the representative of the Patou perfume firm.143

Feeling they were being treated as inferiors by the West, and suffering from American and European racism, the Japanese concluded that they had to make their own place in the world, using force to pursue the manifest destiny of the `imperial way'.

There were flurries of concern in the West when shells landed on foreign concessions or threatened ships. But, as in Manchuria, nobody would take practical steps to hold back Japan even when its army landed at the end of February and marched in to bolster the lacklustre marines.

To get round limits placed on the number of dishes that should be ordered, restaurants served several at the same time on large plates, with alcohol brought to the table in teapots.51

French police and the SS worked together on round-ups in Marseille, classified as 'moral cleansing'. In all, some 75,000 Jews would be deported from France in terrible conditions to concentration camps in eastern Europe. Only 3 per cent returned alive.