“... has an ancestry like that of Rhiannon and Malcolm; he is surely descended from the incorrigible Patrick of the earlier book who lamentably rapes the gentle Jenny instead of marrying her the first time round: an attractive and intelligent if callow cricket-playing Classics master, as ‘English’ an archetype as one could find in the modern novel. Alun and ...”

“... and Thirties, he is right, in that this bonanza inspired a host of emulators. Pirate tales and French Revolution escapades proliferated. But surely there were plenty of able practitioners whose careers overlapped the early years of Sabatini’s, notably Weyman, Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The ...”

“... refused to advertise on Dallas where 30-second slots can cost up to $500,000. Jack Lang, the French minister for the arts, attacked the series as ‘a symbol of American cultural imperialism’. In December 1982, the West German Government took the unprecedented step of issuing a communiqué to the effect that Dallas did not pose a fundamental threat to ...”

“... conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and T.H. Long were earlier on the Random House Dictionary. All very cosy. But while it desirably makes for shared knowledge and a solid ...”

“... for her favourite performer, Charles Hawtrey. She had acquired the English rights in a successful French comedy which satirised the pose of decadence in Fin-de-Siècle society and centred on a ludicrously morbid suicide-pact. Her adaptation was full of paradoxical epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde, with five acts, a Duke and a Duchess among the leading ...”

“... other side of the coin. Like so many of the letters in this second volume, this was written in French. It was an excellent decision on the part of the editors to give us throughout both original and translation. Here the French reads: si, tout en étant primé, il pouvait sans goujaterie rester dans son coin, il ne ...”

“... of the two political camps of right and left’. This positioning caught the imagination of French voters disillusioned with Les Républicains, whose leader, François Fillon, had been disgraced in a nepotism scandal, and with the Parti Socialiste (PS), undermined by François Hollande’s disappointing presidency. Macron had been an investment banker ...”

“... history. Marie Seurat’s memoir of the Middle East reads, inappropriately, like a dandified French novel, from the days of Cocteau and Gide, wilful and impressionistic. She is not a professional writer and acknowledges: ‘Paul-Jean Franceschini helped me give my story a shape.’ She was born to a wealthy Syriac Christian family in Aleppo, Syria, and ...”

“... venture in Palestine, and detained for more than three years in a series of British and French concentration camps on (undeclared) suspicion of being an Axis spy. In both families a tense silence surrounded these episodes. Sensing that his grandfathers must have done something wrong, O’Neill set out to learn what had happened to them; in the ...”

“... which could be the outward signs of a nocturnal scouse cult; and on the Isle of Wight, where the French Benedictine Dom Paul Bellot designed Quarr Abbey, rising above the Solent like a displaced Malian mosque; and at Battersea: Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense power station, fought over for decades, not least by Stamp, was one of the great tokens of its ...”

“... responded angrily to the invitation and denounced the ghettoisation of literature, which the French contingent conceived of as a loss of freedom. Whereas most English-language writers perceive the evolution of openly gay fiction as progressive, in France the same label is treated contemptuously as reactionary and belittling. Nor can the ...”

“... first two months of the new season, Arsenal were without a manager.Who they did have, however, was Patrick Vieira. Before Wenger arrived at Arsenal, he told the club to buy this young, unknown central midfielder from AC Milan. Arsenal were down 1-0 at home to Sheffield Wednesday on 16 September 1996 when, in the 28th minute, Vieira came on for his ...”

“... as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way ...”

“... assassination in 1584. Walsingham’s convictions made the prospect of Elizabeth’s marriage to a French Catholic as odious to him as the yoking of Christ with Belial. Nevertheless, his distaste for the proposed matches with the dukes of Anjou and Alençon that dominated Anglo-French relations in the 1560s and 1570s was ...”

“... straight line and the monumental vista (the straight line, Carmona maintains, was quintessentially French, while omitting to mention that this was so largely from the point of view of the ruling classes: Victor Hugo, in his ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs’, attacked the obsession with the straight line by linking it directly to the oppressive exercise of state ...”