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“... In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights ...”

“... pacifying Kandahar or pummelling Gaddafi is somehow essential to preserving their way of life. David Nichols has written a slight, narrowly focused book that provides modest but not inconsequential insight into the origins of America’s involvement in the Greater Middle East. His focus is the Suez Crisis, or more specifically, the way Eisenhower’s ...”

“... Their Word or Ours?’ (the most original contribution to the volume edited by David Childs), the term ‘Eurocommunism’ constitutes in the first place a resource in the ideological repertoire of certain commentators who are vehemently opposed to the arrival in power, for purposes of serious social transformation, of any Communist Party ...”

“... In their French editions the titles and covers of Lévi-Strauss’s books are often designed to tease as well as to inform. They deserve attention. Tristes Tropiques is about tropes as well as tropics; Mythologiques is about odd kinds of logic as well as mythology; La Pensée Sauvage carried on its cover a picture of a wild pansy which should have warned the English publisher that The Savage Mind was hardly an adequate translation even if the author chose the latter title himself ...”

“... by 11 to one in the English-speaking community. The English are outnumbered five to one by the French, but the French are outnumbered by three to one in Canada as a whole. In North America, finally, the Americans have Canadians outnumbered by a factor of ten. Québec is thus a place where everyone can feel that they have ...”

“... rediscovery of his unfinished epic The Civil War, edited by Allan Pritchard in 1973. What pleases David Trotter is the conception of Cowley as a poet of cultural crisis, of the ‘intellectual revolution’ of the 17th century. Three leading ideas help him to take this view. The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here ...”

“... In​ August 2006 I visited an architect friend called David Martin who lived near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. He was in the middle of a complicated job converting the interior of a nearby château, which had been acquired by a wealthy Japanese client. One evening he produced a large and rather dirty wooden crate ...”

“... Marco Duranti sets out to deconstruct. His copiously evidenced account, drawn from British, French, German, Italian, Dutch and US archives, is that the convention was an individualistic and conservative project, devised outside the offices of governments and the chambers of parliaments and designed to stem the postwar tide of socialism and ...”

“... working class. Piaf heard it and asked one of her librettists, Michel Rivgauche, to compose new French lyrics. It isn’t hard to see why it appealed to her, musically and thematically. She had always been good at milking nostalgia – ‘chanson’ itself is a wistful genre – and the plaintive, rhythmic accordion and piano introduction recalls her prewar ...”

“... Liberal president. He eventually gained the support of Napoleon III, the upstart emperor of the French, and his Spanish wife, Eugénie de Montijo. It was a long way from Puebla to Paris, but ‘Pan Latinism’ flourished at Napoleon’s court. French thinkers stressed their affinity with ‘Latin America’, a term they ...”

“... Sixteen countries were involved in the intervention to some degree, not counting British and French colonial troops (a term which Reid uses to cover Australians and Canadians as well as Moroccans and Senegalese), and military action took place in half a dozen far-flung locations ‘from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific’. But ...”

“... three hundred-page novel written without the e which is by far the most frequently used letter in French. The counterpart to La Disparition was Les Revenentes (1972), a lipogrammatic novel in a, i, o and u – e being the only permitted vowel. No single word in La Disparition can reappear in Les Revenentes, while many of the most familiar words in the ...”

“... or two cases, goofy and inspired. I was particularly taken by Sheila Heti’s decision to turn the French word ‘thus’, ‘ainsi’, into a person, so that ‘Ainsi, si vous en êtes d’accord’ becomes ‘Nancy, could you do that?’ Thirlwell’s idea was to ‘frazzle’, as he says, the ‘whole category of the original’, and his thinking in one ...”

“... A Case of Witchcraft (1998). Michel de Certeau’s Possession at Loudun, first published in French in 1970, has been published in English now because Certeau (who died in 1986) is a very fashionable cultural theorist. Six of his many books have been translated into English in the last dozen years (or rather into Frenglish, for Certeau’s translators ...”

“... To anyone who supposes that Britain is uniquely inhospitable to its intellectuals, while the French give them their proper due, Collini has a story to tell: the grass is not greener across the Channel and it is not so bad here after all. The myth of British exceptionalism is a key component of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it ...”