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“... a young woman in postwar America was suffocating, why not try Paris? Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French tells the story of three college girls – Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis – who did. Kaplan, who wrote about her own year abroad in the memoir French Lessons, takes the three, who didn’t meet, as ...”

“... Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his ...”

“... Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991), Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons: A Memoir (1993) and Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames (1997), a generation of American feminist university teachers use their own experience to shed light on literary, linguistic, artistic, professional, pedagogic and academic issues; and use ...”

“... drawn British publishers’ attention.) Al-Aswany was born in Cairo in 1957. He was educated at a French school and learned English at an early age. A graduate course in dentistry took him to Chicago for three years in the 1980s, where he also studied Spanish so that he could read his favourite South American novels in the original. He became politically ...”

“... dream of clarity (say) is itself an ideological dream, an issue confronted with notable honesty by Philip Thody in his book on Barthes, now reissued with an afterword. Having struggled throughout the earlier edition to translate Barthes into an English critical idiom, helped by much good will and intelligence, hampered by a bewildered sense of how much he was ...”

“... the war, the publication in Wheels of Wilfred Owen’s poems, the 1919 Exhibition of Modern French Art. Their snooty irreverence had made postwar England feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the ...”

“... on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk ...”

“... called Catherine Beijdedvellen. Behar Senior then became a British citizen, having served in the French Foreign Legion and the British Army. On his death in 1936 – a bad period not only in England but throughout Europe – he left a widow and the young George in somewhat reduced circumstances. The change of name from Behar to Blake was understandable ...”

“... Coketown seems an odd way of going forward, however, even if it were possible. The actors on the French revolutionary stage of 1848, Tocqueville observed, were putting on the costumes and replaying the political parts of 1789, while the real social revolution emerged unseen by them. The past can only tell us about the future that does not happen, and ...”

“... never commanded so much as a battalion in the field. He was selected partly because he could speak French, just as his French opposite Saint-Arnaud had been chosen by Napoleon III because he had fluent English. Unfortunately, Saint-Arnaud also had terminal cancer, which was to bring his colourful life to an end shortly after ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”

“... civil religion. O’Brien’s Jefferson presides as high priest of a reified ‘Cult of the French Revolution’. This approach turns out to be timely. O’Brien records that when Timothy McVeigh was arrested on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, he wore a T-shirt bearing the words of Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to ...”

“... an extract from Wesker’s The Kitchen. Less emblematic but equally germane is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are ...”

“... They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular ...”