“... mid-1950s. At a campfire Father Tassin, a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa. Saint-Denis begins to ...”

“... condemned to death for collaboration in Belgium. Simenon helped him to escape to Vietnam with the French Foreign Legion, where he was killed in 1947. There was plenty of conflict around. As with Letter to My Mother, in Dirty Snow the protagonist constantly puts himself in the presence of his antagonist without either of them making their quarrel explicit. In ...”

“... and the local notaire was arrested for the crime. When he was released, for lack of evidence, most French people believed in his guilt because they knew how grandees behaved in a place like Bruay-en-Artois. A certain Madame Weber, la diabolique de Nancy, is to stand trial for two murders and for falsifying a marriage. The affair of le petit Grégory is in this ...”

“... Quelle est cette odeur agréable/Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?’ In the old French carol, the shepherds to whom the angel announces the birth of Christ are first struck by a ravishing scent they can’t identify, then by a great light, and finally by heavenly sounds. This introduction of a smell to the Annunciation story has no biblical justification, as far as I can discover, but it certainly stakes a claim for smell in a hierarchy of the senses ...”

“... chums to the Dardanelles, parading their Classical learning as they passed the islands. Sir John French, C-in-C of the expeditionary force and a doting admirer of the group, desperately wanted to keep them out of harm’s way, but they traded on friendships with Winston Churchill and other prime movers to make sure they went where the action was: honour ...”

“... by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly musical. The next chapter concerns Chaalis, a Cistercian abbey north of Paris which was famous in the medieval period for its ...”

“... the English troops fighting in alliance with France in 1672, and with the Dutch against the French in 1678, when the alliance was reversed. The next year he defeated the Scottish rebels at Bothwell Bridge. Personally brave and a good sort, though with the giddiness endemic to the times, he was kind to Dryden, who was clearly fascinated by him. Together ...”

“... university official bullying any dawdlers. We line up finally before the Vice-Chancellor, Patrick Neill, who looks about as lively as the mercury in a thermometer. He tips his hat, and twenty minutes later I’m heading back down the M40. London, 16 April. A letter from the director of the Thorndike Theatre at Leatherhead, where they are producing my ...”

“... him to Uganda when he was four. At the time of our meeting in Brussels, Kagame was avoiding the French. A few months earlier, in 1991, he’d just returned to his hotel near the Eiffel Tower from a meeting with officials at the Elysée when the French police called him in for interrogation. They were inquiring into a ...”

“... that of the intrepid multilingual translator Mireille Gansel. Working to translate poets into French, Gansel also touches on the mystical relation to the word as professed in Judaic thought. In Singed, a poetic essay on books lost in a fire, the writer Daniela Cascella has suggested the neat coinage ‘trancelation’, the state of self-dissolution some ...”

“... true rites of passage to punctuate the journey which takes him from an adolescence spent studying French at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill (hanging out with poets and artists, going to Sartre’s lectures, listening to Sidney Bechet at the Vieux Colombier) to adulthood: through Harvard Business School and the Fifties, those years of pride which Kiam spent ...”

“... letters from him on learning that he had met Gabrielle Fleury, whom he described to Clara as ‘a French woman of the finest type and infinitely graceful’. What will eventually be the eighth or even ninth volume of an ambitious American project to publish all Gissing’s letters may reveal whether Gissing kept many of Clara’s letters to him. It seems that ...”

“... think it perfectly possible, on the evidence of a young friend who had once caught a glimpse of a French family at dinner, and was sure in consequence she could invent a fiction with a French setting. The notion of the clou which was all the imaginative artist needed appealed to James; and on that evidence Emily would have ...”

“... Romulus using handmade shot cut from lead bars. In Wales the welcome varied. Crewmen of the St Patrick packet, wrecked off Anglesey with the loss of 28 passengers, reached shore only to be robbed by copper miners. In open boars, sooner or later, the problem was ‘Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink’. Ropes were chewed to extract residual ...”

“... never be comprehended by a single person.’ They also typify the difference between English and French intellectual approaches. The very title of Robb’s Parisians announces that it is going to be based on people rather than thesis or theory; while its craftily alluring subtitle ‘An Adventure History of Paris’ seems to hint at Jules Verne (not that he ...”