“... here and there to identify the real-life models for fictional characters. Maugham was born in Paris, where his father was a legal adviser to the British Embassy, and spoke mostly French for the first ten years of his life. His much-loved mother died when he was eight, followed two years later by his father. Maugham, aged ten, was sent back to ...”

“... as well as Gide and Valéry (both of whom he translated into German), Claudel, Cocteau and George Bernard Shaw. Of his contacts with the public figures of his age Leppmann writes: ‘In their ambience he was one of the few people who represented no personal or party interests; who sought no diplomatic, military or economic information and no stock-exchange ...”

“... thing, since Kay was, according to Meyers, still sleeping with her husband, and had affairs with Bernard de Voto and with Lawrance Thompson as well. But Meyers, having secured the story for himself thanks to the co-operation of Morrison’s daughter Anne, has allowed it to skew his biography. Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap ...”

“... rupture, a relation, in short) of which he had never been told, took the line of sending her, from Paris, straight back to her parents – without having touched her – on the ground that he had been deceived. He ended, subsequently, by taking her back into his house to live, but never lived with her as his wife. By the time Lady Gregory told James these ...”

“... made Jerusalem and Tel Aviv into the centres of the relevant research rather than, say, Warsaw, Paris and New York. The 1968 Yad Vashem conference, whose fascinating proceedings were published in English as Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust was a watershed in this regard. Not only did the Jews re-emerge as historical subjects, whose reactions to Nazi ...”

“... His real breakthrough came on studio productions for the likes of the Goons, Charlie Drake, Bernard Cribbins, Beyond the Fringe. Here were comedy records you might want to play more than twice, on which the judicious use of montaged sound effects conjures a believable 3D landscape, where voices scrabble, loom, disappear. Martin’s way with sound could ...”

“... and Dutch voters, but was in no position to accomplish this on her own: for that, governments in Paris and the Hague were necessary. The prospects of any informal German hegemony in Europe, classically considered, seem at present remote. Part of the reason for the relatively subdued profile of the new Germany has been the cost of reunification itself, for ...”

“... the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity. No one would deny that there ...”

“... that as our business grows, our carbon footprint does not’. Last month, its new CEO, Bernard Looney (yes, that’s his name), made a surprising announcement. He said that the company would stop ‘corporate reputation advertising’ as part of a new pledge to become a net zero company by 2050, and that the money being spent on the ...”

“... further amputation or destruction only by the intervention of rival foreign capitals – London, Paris, Vienna, in one memorable crisis even St Petersburg – at the expense of each other. But though external pressures, ever more ominous as the technological gap between Ottoman and European empires widened, might in principle have continued to neutralise ...”

“... to be.Captivated by the ‘rare brilliance’ of Blair’s speech to the National Assembly in Paris the following year, and the ‘effortless aplomb’ of his handling of questions about Europe, Young saluted his skill in leading the country out of the ‘darkness’ of the past, even if he was ‘not yet ready to name the day or the hour when the old ...”

“... by the expectant visitor. A tart note is sounded: West End Turkish baths cannot rival those of ‘Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam or Vienna but they might possibly please gerontophiles or collectors of Edwardiana’ (those museum exhibits again). The well-travelled writer is on the side of the young, who have grown up ‘with a much more sophisticated awareness of ...”

“... demands of art, though his wife, Hope, has paid at least as high a price. Lonoff is a version of Bernard Malamud, and there is another Jewish writer in the book, Felix Abravanel, who is a distillation of Bellow with a dash of Mailer. Pierpont rightly acclaims as ‘one of the most beautifully Jamesian phrases in this James-haunted book’ the description of ...”

“... a pretext for disappearing for a few days: the disappearance would allow her to meet a lover in Paris. That conversation took place after my father had died. He had made tyrannical demands of her in his last years, so that his death came to her as a liberation. She could watch television without constantly being interrupted by shouts from his bedroom to ...”

“... IMF, is under interrogation for her role in the award of €420 million in ‘compensation’ to Bernard Tapie, a well-known crook with a prison record, latterly a friend of Sarkozy. Nonchalant adjacency to crime is bipartisan. François Hollande, current president of the Republic, sat pillion to trysts with his mistress in the flat of a moll of a Corsican ...”