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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been defined in terms of his own peculiar use of symbolism, the symbolism that Yeats got from the French poets, especially Mallarmé. In her essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ Barbara Everett has pointed out these French, echoes: the fact that, for example, ‘Sympathy in White ...”

“... as a pariah state rather than come to heel. So there was something to be said for the view of Philip Baker, a bright young Foreign Office official seconded to the commission (later, as Philip Noel-Baker, to win the Nobel Peace Prize), that ‘the PMC is the most enlightened and most progressive body the council has yet ...”

“... This book, French readers were told one month before its publication last January, ‘is already the intellectual event of 1980’. As if in answer, the first printing of 9,000 copies of the three-volume set, each containing 1,751 pages and weighing ten pounds, sold out within three weeks. At almost £50 per set, Civilisation Matérielle seems likely to prove the commercial event of 1980 ...”

“... and three memoirs. In addition, he wrote 29 plays and translated three more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known’; and here too Maugham must have felt he was on the right track. He was the most highly paid writer of his day. During the 1950s he ...”