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“... that is, invented.’ Gallagher’s next move is to look at some wonderful 19th-century French counter-fictions with titles like Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836), Uchronie (1857) and Éternité par les astres (1872). The title of the first is self-explanatory – the book, by Louis Geoffroy-Château, is about what didn’t happen after ...”

“... unfamiliar, in language or habit. In his various book-lined studies there is no sign that great French or Russian literature sat alongside his editions of Hardy, Waugh and his favourite 19th-century Uranian poets. He hated abroad on principle, with the exception of Australia, which he visited in 1961 and celebrated for its wonderful light, architectural ...”

“... was time to internationalise himself. He learned enough Danish, Latin, English, Russian, German, French and Italian to read or get by in, and in most cases rather more. By turns, he put himself through Brandes and Tolstoy; Dostoevsky and Strindberg; Tagore; Bourget and Proust; Freud, Jung and Adler; Joyce and Hemingway. ‘If there was one 20th-century ...”

“... At the Paris Salon​ of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are sketching from a ringleted, clothed female model, concentrating on getting the folds of the drapery right ...”

“... the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in this country’ – Germany – ‘will be accomplished much more quickly than in France. The French just sit around in realms of self-pity, telling one atrocity story after another.’ The Germans he stayed with ‘have done their best to impress us with the idea that they were never Nazis … These houses are frequently full of Nazi propaganda, most ...”

“... language of the computer has taken over at least in parody. In an article in the magazine Byte, Philip Schrodt, not clearly identified by Petroski, has described the pencil as a generic word-processor and the pencil point as ‘the character insertion sub-unit’. Petroski himself concludes, after a detailed study of how the pencil was perfected as a ...”

“... explained how ‘gloriously liberating’ he found the ‘scratch and sniff pictures’ of Philip Guston which ‘smelled of stale vodka and cigarettes, old spunk and dirty sheets’. Other artists were praised for shamelessly cocking their legs (De Chirico!) or for ‘drooling over fleshy naked women’ with a ‘quite shocking lack of ...”

“... dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank ...”

“... chief aim, which was not to acquire a deep sociological knowledge of native life but to keep the French and the Russians out. Foliard’s notion that a coherent concept of the Middle East emerged through mapping in the early 20th century mixes together what were actually various separate processes. The first was the general increase in interest in ...”

“... Sciascia (Italy), Bernhard Schlink (Germany). What must be its mandarin masterpiece was written in French in 1969: Georges Perec’s La Disparition is a lipogram, from the Greek lipogrammatos (‘missing symbol’), denoting a text that excludes one or more letters. The letter ‘e’, which doesn’t appear once in its 300 pages, is understood to represent ...”

“... procession is seditious, menacing, propelled by a wild music – part carnivalesque, part dirge (Philip Miller is the composer) – and by the moves of a jubilant dancer, in silhouette like the rest of the troupe. Elsewhere in the piece, we’re asked to think about time as if it weren’t the thing we experience. That’s not easy: just as ideas about the ...”

“... progressivists, structuralists and deconstructionists. Reminding one of those early 20th-century French hard-liners who insisted on calling themselves Catholics sans epithète, Elton pleads for plain, unadorned history as he himself has practised it. As we learned from The Practice of History (1967), history for him is practice – doing, not theorising ...”

“... the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky. During his schooldays in Monaco he was known as Cointreau-Whisky, and his poetry includes characters with equally peculiar monikers – Rotsoge, Madame Salmajour, Monsieur ...”