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“... Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel duty-bound to remark on ...”

“... Trust’s own auspices, back past its effective origins with Sackville-West and Lees-Milne to the French 1790s when the associational context linking art works to Church and aristocratic Château had to be bravely defended against the ‘public interest’ of a throat-slitting and atheistic mob. But it is in the current revival of Classical architecture that ...”

“... was also described as a ‘free-born black’ from Martinique, an island on the other side of the French colonial empire. More immediately, he had come from Paris, where he had been put in the Châtelet prison and then, to his outrage, exiled to Ile de France by order of the Naval Minister. What he was supposed to have done to warrant this treatment is far ...”

“... when he was 18. It’s never been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of ...”

“... and Peter Lilley, whose holidays in his house in France enabled him to break into colloquial French in the course of a ludicrous comic turn about foreigners coming to this country to partake of the social services which he is assiduously dismantling. As always when a course of action is urged on him by his enemies in the cabinet, whom he describes as ...”

“... ability to use smart writing to make a teen plot seem a true account of the place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their ...”

“... uncertain that he has occasional difficulty with phrases imported from his own native French. But of course what Poirot spots is true, and, if we have not remarked the fact as we read, it is for a reason taking us straight to the heart of Christie’s mystery. Her writing is so flat and cliché-ridden and undistinguished that we pay very little ...”

“... could be fought and defeated on their own terms. Unlike their close contemporaries in the postwar French Left, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the group led by Cornelius Castoriadis, the Situationists saw their project both as a critique of modern capitalism and its alienating social processes, and as a set of solutions that the dead language of classical ...”

“... solitary, Claude Lévi-Strauss is the least fashionable, and most influential, of the postwar French theorists. Lévi-Straussians are a nearly extinct tribe in Anglo-American universities, far outnumbered by Foucauldians, Derrideans and Deleuzians. But, in a paradox he might have enjoyed, his imprint has been deeper. Like the Amerindian myths he ...”

“... suede shoes, size three and a half. Many Nazi officers in Paris bought expensive gifts for their French lovers, but the shoes were for Rommel’s wife, Lucie Maria. He delivered them to her in Germany, as a surprise, on 6 June, a date that has gone down in history as ‘the longest day’, but was also Frau Rommel’s fiftieth birthday.Rommel was due to ...”

“... Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city ...”

“... with Pope and Swift. You will not have noticed anything in translation. If you do encounter any French political writing, you’ll know you’re in the wrong corridor. You’ll have to make a half-turn and backtrack through Sir Walter Scott. This is tricky. Be careful not to go too far because the Waverley novels will return you, inevitably, to The Castle ...”

“... and told her a good deal about the sad family history. It may have been for these reasons that Patrick Brontë commissioned Gaskell to write his daughter’s biography, a task that could have been made to order for her. In the first volume she set her motherless heroine as a domestic, shy but compassionate feminine jewel set in a gothic Yorkshire. The ...”

“... of a comet; some explained the Great Plague of 1665 by appealing to comets; and in 1750 the French astronomer Pierre Maupertuis said that whole species must have perished in the past history of the Earth when comets came near. Evidently comets are uncomfortable neighbours for the planets in our Solar System: for several centuries they have been ...”

“... been called away to a committee), declares: ‘Count yourself lucky your allegiance is not to the French. No stamina, the French.’In 1954, she at last finds a teaching job, at a convent school in Bethnal Green. When the headmistress, Sister Consuelo, ushers Gilroy into her new classroom, the children dive for cover under ...”