“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a little girl called Vivienne (Eliana Michaud). She sees him when she thinks of her father, a French Canadian who fought against the English and was executed by them. This and later moments in the film are dated by the start and end of the American Civil War (1861-65), when the girl is a grown-up. The adult Vivienne is wonderfully played by Vicky ...”

“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... are a fiercely bellicose nation [who] have overturned the ancient military glory of the French by victories so numerous’ that they had flattened the kingdom of France. What had happened to make the English such an effective force in the decades since their humiliating defeat at Bannockburn in 1314? The short answer is the Battle of Crécy in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that ...”

“... the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French. Within two decades, the Conquest had been commemorated by two astonishing historical artefacts. The Bayeux Tapestry (pre-1082) must be the only artistic masterpiece that is also a crucial source for a major historical event. Domesday Book (1086) provides ...”

“... executives and club shareholders. According to Dominique Spinosi, the security chief of the French World Cup Committee, ‘the British invented the poison of hooliganism at the start, but they have also invented the antidote.’ The cure is rigid ticket arrangements, a sensible separation of fans and a legal squeeze against touts: but by allocating 60 ...”

“... each was drafting his first (and in Sturt’s case only) novel. They read a lot of avant-garde French fiction. ‘You find fault with Maupassant for his wealth of irrelevant (à vous entendre) detail,’ Bennett complained. ‘Frankly, I think you would do well to follow him some way in this. I don’t think his detail is irrelevant.’ Sturt seems to have ...”

“... you have actually seen: Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the Resistance, for instance, or David Lean’s Bridge on the River Seine, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Shadows of the Army. The film opens with a homage to Leone, Morricone-style music (by Morricone, as it happens) on the soundtrack, and the words ‘Once upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied ...”

“... they also meant to use it to drive a wedge between London and Paris. Knowing that London feared French ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean, Nicholas hoped for an understanding with the British. Returning to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed ...”