Enraged at the slaughter of Murron, his new bride and childhood love, Scottish warrior William Wallace slays a platoon of the local English lord's soldiers. This leads the village to revolt and, eventually, the entire country to rise up against English rule.

Marie (and her three fathers) are taking A-levels. Marie passes. She spends the summer in the country with her mother, Sylvia, who has returned from America with her Californian husband who has two sons. Marie falls in and out of love for the first time in front of her alarmed fathers, who see Marie's innocence slipping away at frightening speed, and their relationships with the two women become even more complicated.

Michel is a bored, lonely, cheap-thrills-seeker. Everything changes when he finds an unusual bobble head doll in the shape of a pretty woman that can say "I love you" and falls in love with it to the point of obsession.

The first thing to know is that there is the sea in Dieppe. It is very rare not to see the sea when you are in Dieppe. Should really be a failure to miss the sea in Dieppe. Bibi, our hero, has missed everything: the pace, the sensitivity, the woman, the behavior. Life has always spared her happiness.

Adrien does not see eye to eye with his patrician father about much. It is 1912, and the old man still believes in the old rules which strait-jacket "men of class." He believes that the elite have the right to conquer where they can, that they should refrain from publicizing their improprieties, and he is rabidly pro-military. Adrian, kicked out of his military school for his own improprieties (and hiding that from his father), is naturally drawn to Vicky a beautiful divorced woman and friend of the family who is staying at their mansion. The family tutor, a man of ordinary background (with some ideas which seem radical in this household) is similarly smitten. On the basis of their shared attraction, the two men form a friendship. Meanwhile, the object of their affection finds it diverting to toy with them.

Prague, 1920. Milena's father wants her to follow in his footsteps and be one of the first female doctors in Czechoslovakia, but she is determined to be a writer. She elopes to Vienna with the Jewish music critic Ernst Pollak, and starts a correspondence with Franz Kafka. She leaves Pollak and returns to Prague with her father, where she befriends and translates Kafka. As a journalist, Milena covers the 1923 Ruhr worker's strike and meets the communist architect Jaromir.

A foundling, raised in the circus, Sam Lion becomes a businessman after a trapeze accident. However, when he reaches fifty and becomes tired of his responsibilities and of his son Jean-Philippe, he decides to disappear at sea. However, he runs into Albert Duvivier, one of his former employees. He comes to realise that he has ignored the important things in his life.

Maud Bailey, a brilliant English academic, is researching the life and work of poet Christabel La Motte. Roland Michell is an American scholar in London to study Randolph Henry Ash, now best-known for a collection of poems dedicated to his wife. When Maud and Roland discover a cache of love letters that appear to be from Ash to La Motte, they follow a trail of clues across England, echoing the journey of the couple over a century earlier.

After the death of her rich parents, the young Paulette claims her heritage and then starts to give it away for the good of people. Doing so, she's making executives of her parent's company furious.

An assassin signs his crimes by cutting off the ears of his victims which he places between their teeth. In order to proceed with his arrest, an expert in criminology is contacted.