“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that reference water: vast bodies of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... expert in structures and skins supported by their own tension. Another key mentor was the elegant French designer Jean Prouvé, with whom the peripatetic Piano studied in Paris. From his sculptural collaborations with Constantin Brancusi, through his furniture designs, to his modular schemes for colonial housing, Prouvé was adept at smooth combinations of ...”

“... was how it would be done. Gaskell filled some pages about Brontë in Brussels by printing (in French) several of the pieces of work Brontë wrote for Héger. Then she made a more dangerous, more novelistic move, substituting the story of Branwell Brontë’s involvement with his employer Mrs Robinson for Charlotte’s parallel obsession with ...”

“... representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of May.Sidney’s ...”

“... prevailed in our eastern dominions’, ran concurrently with his counter-revolutionary activism in French affairs. He was thought to be over the top on both issues. The latest volume of the Clarendon Press’s Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (which includes the nearest thing we have to a full-dress modern edition of the Reflections, somewhat ...”

“... own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they wished; and to elect a master and two wardens every ...”

“... Middle Ages England was a Continental power; during much of that time, our laws were written in French. Over half of Shakespeare’s plays are set on the Continent. Donizetti and Verdi certainly regarded English literature as part of their own heritage ... Our architecture is obviously part of European architecture, just as our literature and music arc of ...”

“... sent dozens of blokes to Mavis and they’ve all come back raving about her. She’s a genuine French polisher, the real McCoy. She gives the most bloody wonderful blow-job it’s possible to have. She’s an artist at it. So Mavis it is, and Dad – when next seen – is indeed gleamingly French-polished, and an ...”