“... on offer. No doubt this made them feel better, but has it left them any better off? The French will get their chance next spring. It will be nice to see Sarkozy get his comeuppance, if that is what happens, but it will not be nice to see what has to be said and done and promised and trivialised in order to get there. If elections are not the ...”

“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of runs. In the tradition of General MacArthur, David Gower has announced his return. I hope he succeeds ...”

“... over trenches, barbed-wire and shell-torn territory to kill and capture large numbers of Germans. David Omissi remarks on the accuracy with which Jemadar Shah Mirza (a jemadar was a junior NCO) describes the action and its short-term consequences for the enemy; as usual no general breakthrough was achieved. Letters of this date and from these regiments are ...”

“... not know about themselves.’ Ah, si j’avais à écrire une histoire des noirs, Baldwin told a French reporter quoted by James Campbell, je devrais interviewer les blancs. James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way women have been used as mirrors by men, and Simone de Beauvoir’s suggestion that the very notion of a ...”

“... hands have the ability to break up concentrations of wealth and power. Mount greatly admires the French, who he says have gone much further down the path to decentralisation in recent years than we have. But the French state was able to decentralise because it was so centralised: the directive to disperse power came from ...”

“... French philosophers become notorious when, deviating from Anglo-American ‘common sense’, they appear to cast aside respect for truth, tradition, reality and reason. Michel Foucault is a case in point, for his books typify the manoeuverings that result. There is a growing body of secondary literature explaining his vagarious development, and the best study so far is a joint effort by two Berkeley scholars, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher, and Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist ...”

“... insanity, homosexuality, and also impotence, the subject of Pierre Darmon’s study, published in French in 1979 and now available in English translation. Darmon’s book, written with passion in a rather heavy Gallic rhetoric somewhat difficult to turn into fluent English, is at once a history of an institution of the old regime and a critique of ...”

“... virtually came to an end, seems less convincing. It is true that after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution people no longer thought of a world turned upside down by satanic forces when they tried to explain misgovernment or misfortune: they put the blame where it belonged, on the shoulders of the monarchs, the rich, the priests and politicians. The ...”

“... his own nose and fond of the woman could have handled it, I suggest, by wearing plasticine under a French letter.’ The remarks about Swinburne date from 1931. Empson displayed bufferish tendencies at the very beginning of his career, although he didn’t elaborate them into a strategy until his return to England in 1951. Bufferdom was not some kind of ...”

“... on the Elizabethan Wollaton Hall) and Thomas Brassey’s Normanhurst (in the grandest style of a French château) showed what they could do when they put their minds and their purses to it. By the end of the 19th century, this balance had shifted dramatically. Many among the old élite were hard hit by the agricultural depression, and it was only those with ...”

“... a long time for them to mobilise. Allied troops were war-weary, and widespread mutinies in the French army, involving up to 40,000 men, were a stark reminder of the fragility of morale. In October 1917, German reinforcements enabled the Austro-Hungarian army to win a major victory at Caporetto: 265,000 Italians surrendered and 400,000 fled in ...”

“... Jasmin Delouche, goes birdnesting at the age of 20.) This school, set in its reassuringly familiar French village – the blacksmith’s, the washhouse, the smell of the boys crowding round the stove – is the only place of security in the book. Any venture into the world means loss: Meaulnes can’t find his way back to the Domain, Frantz loses his ...”

“... his wife in August 1793: ‘I hardly think this war can last, for what are we at war about?’ The French had executed Louis XVI in January, which might have given Nelson a hint. Further clues to the significance of this particular war could be found at the Battle of the Nile five years later, when British ships with names derived from classical antiquity ...”

“... of confidence as they stretch for snazzy English renditions of Simenon’s enigmatically blunt French. Pietr-le-Letton from 1931 was first translated in 1933 – note that English publishers were onto Maigret pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In ...”