“... overlooked. This book corrects that omission, giving a compelling account of the Burgundian and French contexts in which Anne was raised to be a lady of the court. Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she ...”

“... Ambassadors: Hans Holbein’s life-sized double portrait of 1533 depicting Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador in England, and his friend and fellow humanist Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, who passed through London in the spring of 1533, around the time of Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Selve was later appointed ...”

“... world in its 19th-century Latin form as the jus primae noctis (a prudish rewriting of the French), the droit de cuissage stipulated the seigniorial lord’s right to deflower newly married brides on his domain. The term conjoins juristic privilege and sexual abuse in its combination of ‘right’ (droit) and ‘thigh’ (cuisse). It first appears in ...”

“... pleasance, reachable only by boat – in the marshy grounds of his favourite castle, Kenilworth. A French astrologer, who gave the king an astrolabe in July 1415, believed he would have been better suited to a career in the Church (possibly on the basis that Henry spoke to him in Latin), but Henry’s uxorious motto – ‘une sanz pluis’ (‘one and no ...”

“... eating-houses’; Emir starts with a character taking a fungus found in their flat to a French chef for identification. What The Bloater and her other later novels have in common with the poetry is the commanding ‘I’: Tonks’s sulky and self-destructive mouthpiece. It would be unbearable if she wasn’t so good-humoured. Entire groups run afoul ...”

“... duty and alert. She jogs Ms Benkovitz’s elbow on the very epigraph page, where a sentence whose French seems questionably transcribed is attributed to a painter barely recognisable under the unfamiliar form ‘Jean Ingres’. She does not allow Ms Benkovitz even to complete her two-page Prologue without a nasty collision of plural and singular: ‘His ...”

“... her scatterbrained promiscuity and her early life. The other story is about a neurologist called Philip Wild, a man of a certain age and an even more certain obesity. He writes in the first person of what he calls ‘the art of self-slaughter’, not suicide but a form of mental magic, in which he makes his unloved body disappear bit by bit, only to ...”

“... As the years ticked by England became more and more isolated diplomatically. A cold war with Philip II of Spain had turned by the 1580s into military intervention in the Low Countries and France, and war at sea. With her rival claim to the Tudor throne, Mary Queen of Scots made Elizabeth’s refusal either to marry or to name a successor the most ...”

“... Yet they were also – or were supposed to be – places of quiet, intensive study. When the French jurist and antiquarian Claude Bellièvre visited the Vatican Library around 1514, he copied down a papal edict: readers must not quarrel, make noise or ‘cross the desks [to which books were chained] and tear them up with their feet’. Violators were ...”

“... examples, is the Gospel of St Mark, and it attends to many recent works on this subject, mostly in French or German. A tone of yearning sorrow is often present, but Kermode’s theory must be applied to his own work: this tone should be part of his novelistic technique. He has long been keeping abreast of the latest ideas from the Continent, and I have ...”

“... to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,’ a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe’s response: ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A French writer,’ she says, ‘a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to ...”

“... John, off to France to be civilised. There, at Blois and Angers, Buckingham learned how to speak French, fence and ride: the skills of a courtier. On his return, he found a mentor in Sir James Graham, a gentleman of the privy chamber (and a former favourite himself). While away from court on progress, James stopped at Apethorpe in ...”

“... he lost these territories for good in 1214 after being diplomatically and militarily outwitted by Philip II of France. In one view, John’s reign makes more sense as an ending of the cosmopolitan political settlement, sometimes called the ‘Angevin empire’, in which English kings also controlled territory in nearly half of France.Kings do hate to give up ...”

“... political debt that we all owe to a Greek heritage almost three thousand years old’, while the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, spoke of France as the daughter of Classical Greece and welcomed the modern country into the Community as a sister. Is it any wonder that the Greeks, having been placed on such an exalted pedestal, feel affronted by the ...”

“... Chaeronea, a town in Boeotia in central Greece, was the site of a showdown in 338 bc between Philip II of Macedon and a coalition led by Athens and Thebes, Boeotia’s biggest city. Philip won the day. Three years later, Thebes was sacked by Philip’s son Alexander, and under Roman ...”