“... the dying days of the Ancien Régime. Jane’s sailor-brother Captain Frank Austen reports in the Patrick O’Brian style on the high point of his naval career when, off St Domingo on 6 February 1806, his ship Canopus gave a French three-decker ‘a tickling which knocked all his sticks away’. Where there’s insufficient ...”

“... instance, her characters will carry around with them some private verbal formula – frequently in French – which is clung to less for its actual meaning than for its talismanic value: Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème, Mrs Hawkins’s pisseur de copie, and here Margaret Murchie’s threatening preoccupation with les autres. And note how, even more ...”

“... Protestant reform in each of their provincial towns), and they remained sufficiently interested in French politics to write in a surprisingly well-informed fashion about the subject twenty years later. The dispute between Henri of Navarre and his estranged Catholic wife, Marguerite de Valois, over control of Aquitaine; the wider dynastic and religious feuding ...”

“... wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for the Resistance under cover of his work in the textile trade. After crossing into Spain through the Pyrenees, he had presented himself at the British consulate ...”

“... took off and landed faster than them. In all its movements, Trubshaw and his colleagues and their French counterparts had learned to expect an element of hurtle, exhilarating to master. Events came at a Concorde pilot at a more adrenalised tempo. Trubshaw liked this: it was stretching. In the 1990s, having retired to a Cotswold village, he sometimes nipped ...”

“... Elizabethans internalised and used to make sense of their world. Here the scholarship of Patrick Collinson, to which Lake’s Bad Queen Bess? is a critical response, was transformative, showing nothing less than a politics of emergency, with privy council and parliaments pressing to execute Mary Queen of Scots and mobilise loyal Protestant subjects ...”

“... a Hendaye.’ At that point a footnote invites the reader to consult further documents in English, French and German. The question that really holds Lee’s attention is this: how well, or how badly, has Ireland conducted its affairs, given the conditions it has had to meet? The state, as the Provisional Government received it from the British on 16 January ...”

“... Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic in those titles, ‘Voodoo’, ‘Taboo’. They sound like perfumes, expressing as they do the same white exotic fantasies of primeval passion. Robeson couldn’t help it if his stage ...”

“... accent and a more civilised tone. He started out in precisely this role, as a propagandist and French-polisher of the knotty wood of de Valera’s Ireland. But he became, for a time at least, a deep embarrassment to the new rules, an utterer of insults and denunciations all the more dreadful because they were spoken so suavely. As a writer of ...”

“... bar, it hardly mattered. She herself got her one detail wrong – that Lucan spoke perfect French. That didn’t matter either. The copy rolled for a whole week and one headline actually read: ‘Lucan traced to Cherbourg.’ Among the people I talked to, while working for my Sunday Times article, was Dominic Elwes, portrait ...”

“... piquant contrast to emerge between the flowery journal entries of the newly-arrived teacher in a French provincial town, and the sordid reality of the human experience which is taking place there. Chantal, anxious to persuade herself that life away from Paris can be worthwhile, weaves a chivalric fantasy around an affair between two pupils which ends in the ...”

“... turn down Yeats’s volume, evade his peremptory rhetoric. Seamus Heaney has disclosed that it was Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry that showed him what might still be done: though I think it must also have indicated the limits of that achievement. Flann O’Brien had to rid his mind of Joyce before he could do his proper work: the riddance is At ...”

“... Foundation, which the Oxford Department of Education had produced in 1960. When 374 pupils in French lycées, and 335 in German gymnasien, were asked to compile an imaginary Baccalauréat or Abitur in which they were allowed to drop all but four subjects, and to choose those four without restriction, only five out of the 709 chose all four from the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... marriage to Peggy, his Scottish sweetheart, that rapidly gives way to ‘erotic abandon’ with a French girlfriend. A dozen years later, MacDiarmid would be deeply wounded when Peggy left him for another man. For all his deploring of Harry Lauder, MacDiarmid himself in some ways conformed at various times to the easiest Scottish stereotypes: the boasting ...”