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“... the Tatars as a fifth column, and repression often followed. In the Crimean War, as Ottoman, French and British troops invaded, tens of thousands were killed in battle or through disease, horrors vividly described in Tolstoy’s Sebastopol Sketches. Tatar leaders were quick to plead allegiance to Russia: ‘We Muslims, from young to old, must be ...”

“... influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John Heilpern has taken ...”

“... formation as an Ausstellungsmacher, and it is no more than touched on by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his breezy book about ‘how curating took over the art world – and everything else’. But both do point out how far we have come from the original avatars of the term (whose root is cura or ‘care’): the curatores, the civil servants who ...”

“... and there were not only substantial numbers of Polish speakers in the east but pockets where French, Dutch, Lithuanian or Russian was the native tongue. Like other German states after 1815, only more so, Prussia faced a daunting task of state-building. Undertaken against a background of social, political and religious conflicts that efforts at ...”

“... Mathias, who murders a rich traveller and builds a distinguished career on the proceeds, raised a French potboiler ‘to the status of a dramatic masterpiece’, changing the character from a stock stage villain into ‘any one of us, an innocent man who, of a sudden, gives in to temptation’. Similarly, Irving was the first actor to give a sympathetic ...”

“... was preceded by Paris (1810-13), where he spent a year ‘beneath the eye’ of Jacques-Louis David. Here he received the full stamp of French neoclassicism. But David, whom Eckersberg described as a ‘very rigorous and precise teacher’, was also ‘against submission to one ...”

“... with Great Power privileges flapping like ragged ensigns in the wind. Disaster taught the postwar French elites a good deal. From Dien Bien Phu through Suez – the only time it exercised its veto against the US – and on to the end in Algeria, France learned better than Britain how to cuts its losses for maximum gain, turning decolonisation into an economic ...”

“... criticism for some time: in Paris he turned to poetic drama. He also corrected the Ambassador’s French, had a fine ink-throwing fight with one of the Third Secretaries in the Chancery, became an admirer, friend and opponent at tennis of Sarah Bernhardt, of whom he later wrote a biography, and, though attracted to Catholicism, put off conversion from ...”

“... these characters are not human at all. Their nails are turning into claws, their teeth into fangs. French revolutionaries are becoming monsters before our eyes. As this exhibition, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution, forcefully demonstrates, the claim that such a ghoulish transformation was ...”

“... When René Goscinny, the creator of Astérix, died in 1977, it was, in the words of one French obituary, ‘as if the Eiffel Tower had fallen down’. The cartoon adventures of the plucky little Gaul holding out against Roman conquest (with the help of a magic potion that could confer a few minutes’ irresistible strength at a single gulp) were as much a defining part of French cultural identity as the most distinctive monument on the Paris skyline ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... Hastings, the supposedly corrupt Governor of the East India Company, but he also supported the French Revolution and the cause of Irish emancipation (although he was never to return to the land of his birth). Chaotic in his personal finances, a heavy drinker and moderate philanderer, Sheridan lost Eliza to tuberculosis in 1792, saw the theatre he rebuilt ...”

“... of Guelders than to the murky compromises emerging from John of Gaunt’s negotiations with the French … In the Monk of Westminster’s account, Richard used his influence not to recommend concessions to the French, but to moderate them. The chronicler asserts that the king would have liked to make some of these ...”

“... trade, had served in the army for a decade and lost his right arm in 1745 in a battle against the French at Fontenoy. Reference to this mutilation, a perpetual reminder of the horrors of war, would show up sometimes overtly but also by displacement in Gillray’s prints. Both parents were faithful members of the Moravian Brotherhood – a key, perhaps, to ...”

“... lovers laugh and are immortal.’ Something has gone wrong with the translation here, since the French says ‘where one always loves for ever and never loves for always’, but it doesn’t make any difference, since the words aren’t supposed to mean anything anyway. In general this translation is a miracle of patience and suppleness, loyal to all the ...”