“... mirror up to them, in the tawdry and convoluted intrigues of The Jew of Malta, performed at the Rose Theatre in February 1592, a few weeks after his deportation from Flushing. So we have these two spies or projectors, these two Richards or Dicks, and their apparent recollections of Marlowe’s blasphemies. They closely corroborate one another on the ...”

“... as badly as he thinks. According to the OECD we remain relatively tolerant of minorities (behind France but ahead of Germany), despite the hard turn against immigration; we may be sexist – according to the UN rapporteur on violence against women – but we’re not homophobic; and we’re no longer at the bottom of Unicef’s child well-being league table ...”

“... Napoleon’s Code as ephemeral as his victories. It endures as the core of civil law not only in France but in its former European possessions, and their former possessions too, encompassing ex-French Africa, all of Latin America and the Philippines by way of Spain, and Indonesia by way of the Netherlands, as well as Quebec and Louisiana. Even that list ...”

“... July and stayed for the next two years, first in Ireland and then in Wiltshire, before crossing to France on D-Day. He was part of what Wendy Webster terms ‘the great proposition’, a phrase taken from the opening scenes of The True Glory, an Anglo-American war documentary produced in 1945. ‘Funny thing,’ an American voice pronounces. ‘On the way over ...”

“... anatomy of the brain?’ ‘Not very much.’ ‘Yes, it would take a very long time.’ Aristide rose and walked over to his desk, and picked up a plastic, grapefruit-size model of the brain – one of the few things on it. Then he sat down again across from me and pulled the model apart to show me the corpus callosum, which, he said, processes everything ...”

“... murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where Eco’s plot turns on a secret copy of a lost book, Binet’s this time revolves around a lost cycle of paintings. Another obvious precursor ...”

“... walls, as in a Wren City church, were juxtaposed with piers cased in timber at the base which then rose into arches without capitals in between – all most irregular. It took years to furnish St Agnes with the wealth of screens and fittings Scott wanted. All Hallows never got that far before funds ran dry. It is often said that the late Victorian ...”

“... Fred Vargas is a woman. Said to be the sixth best-selling author in France, she is unusual there in being a female crime writer, in contrast with women’s dominance of the genre in Britain. Vargas also writes like a woman, if that implies an interest in character, feeling and motive, rather than ‘brutality and eroticism’ (Queneau’s description of the polar – a contraction of policier – a genre inspired by the Série noire’s postwar translations of American crime novels ...”

“... was told by his uncle that his father was a courageous man who died in a duel. By the 1960s, as he rose through the ranks of King Idris’s army, other stories were doing the rounds. We flash back to a brutal, impromptu interview with an NCO, who informs him that he was fathered by an Allied pilot, a Corsican brought down over the desert by the Germans in ...”

“... and about the same number of objects from Africa and Oceania, which he was among the first in France to acquire. At one point or another he possessed no fewer than 53 paintings and 180 drawings by Seurat alone.A secret agent in plain view, Fénéon led multiple lives in the 1880s and 1890s. He worked at the War Ministry (of all places), and quickly ...”

“... of March 1917 only six U-boats had been sunk in 142 actions with destroyers. Meanwhile the losses rose to appalling figures: in 1916 2,327,000 tons; in 1917 6,236,000; of these 881,000 were in April alone, more than 60 per cent without warning. April 1917 was a terrible month by land as well as by sea, with the bloodiest fighting on the Western Front and the ...”

“... element’ whose German blood had been contaminated by centuries in Eastern Europe. Resentment rose in proportion to the size of this new population. In 1950 they accounted for 17 per cent of West Germany’s population and 24 per cent of East Germany’s. They were expected to move to rural areas where there was less war damage, and communities were split ...”

“... Bolivia, prepared a huge collection of specimens that he planned to transport via Buenos Aires to France, but he so impressed the native servant guarding the boxes with the value of their contents that the servant absconded with the lot. De Jussieu, Honigsbaum tells us, was so disheartened that he returned to Lima, where he practised medicine and consoled ...”

“... heading for Ireland, lost in winter storms. For anyone who thought the naval wars against France were simply a matter of ships called La Révolution, Le Droit du Peuple and Ça Ira being seen off by Indefatigable, Impregnable and Implacable, this handbook to history comes as a timely corrective. The shipwrecks listed include the one in which Lord ...”

“... working-class Belfast on TV, in fact and fiction. But viewing the familiar mayhem at a seminar in France made me more conscious of the processes whereby a slice of life ends up as a critical category. Ireland is used to being processed abroad: whether in the memories of ‘exiles wandering over lands and seas’, or by IASAIL (the International Association ...”