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“... that of the intrepid multilingual translator Mireille Gansel. Working to translate poets into French, Gansel also touches on the mystical relation to the word as professed in Judaic thought. In Singed, a poetic essay on books lost in a fire, the writer Daniela Cascella has suggested the neat coinage ‘trancelation’, the state of self-dissolution some ...”

“... of European art. After Poussin, the loftiest of the city’s easel painters, died in 1665, the French would treat his legacy (and that of Claude, his fellow expat) as their own national property. And by 1680, when the long career of Bernini, Rome’s multimedia cultural supremo, came to an end, the appetite of the city’s churchmen and grandees for ...”

“... three major exhibitions, of books from the DDR, from the Soviet Union, and of books published in French in Hungary, to tie in with a visit Mitterrand is soon to make to Budapest. Book Week is a national event, started in 1929 and held annually towards the end of May. Streets, squares or marketplaces in Budapest and many provincial towns are closed off ...”

“... by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly musical. The next chapter concerns Chaalis, a Cistercian abbey north of Paris which was famous in the medieval period for its ...”

“... scalding, staplebound enemy of mixed metaphors, pan-Germanism, the House of Habsburg, everything French, pro-semites and anti-semites, and the popular press, especially Vienna’s paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. In 1899, the 24-year-old Kraus – the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer from Gitschin in Bohemia, now Jičín in the Czech Republic ...”

“... stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to Europeans’. In 1898, Baedeker simply told tourists that they ‘present an unpleasing exterior’. The ...”

“... vision of the enormous opportunity for personal enjoyment and enrichment culminates in the French creation of the Universities of the Third Age. In these there is a free exchange of specialised knowledge between participants. For a period which may be only five years but may extend to 30, people are sure of an income and have no need to enter ...”

“... by being forced to give up untrammelled power in England as he had by the loss of most of his French empire to Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bouvines the year before. The meadow had been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day – ‘Runny’ comes from the same ...”

“... English Constitution under his arm and, more practically, including a thorough instruction in the French language at the hands of a refugee Belgian countess. What is important about the war years is that there was no question of the princesses joining the Dutch, Danish and Norwegian royalties in Canada. ‘To the Queen of England,’ says Lady ...”

“... All the unhurried day,’ Philip Larkin wrote, addressing a long-dead girl who had been drugged and raped in London, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ All that day, and many days more, no doubt. But then presumably, since the girl later talked calmly enough to Mayhew, the drawer gradually closed, the glint of the knives softened, and life continued ...”

“... at times owe as little to religion as political blackness does to the idea of Africa’. Philip Lewis, a resident of Bradford with firsthand knowledge of its complex and often divided Muslim communities, did not anticipate the latest round of troubles to afflict the city. Rather he offers a cautiously optimistic view of accommodation and change. He ...”

“... and Garibaldi is defending the newly established Roman Republic against the besieging Habsburg and French armies. Observing from the fringes (in cafés and hotels), Claude writes a series of letters in which he rehearses his political uncertainties and his bungled love affair with another English tourist, Mary Trevellyn, whom he chases in vain across ...”

“... a Fred Karno’s army, untrained, largely unarmed, and kitted out in the horizon-blue uniforms the French had mothballed twenty years earlier. Three weeks after he joined it, Stefan’s division was chaotically dissolved with an every-man-for-himself order. He spent the next two years as itinerantly as he had spent the previous war: in hiding, on the road, in ...”

“... Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a ...”

“... warnings in his prose of a hidden part of him that was more real to him than much of what he did. Philip, his fictional alter ego in The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, Thomas’s only novel, believes as an adolescent that ‘there was something at the back of my mind, not quite hidden from myself and my schoolfellows – a weight, a darkness – which was against ...”