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“... an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for him. The French ambassador to the Holy See, the duc d’Harcourt, remained alone in the chamber for 45 minutes, speaking in a loud voice so that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met ...”

“... David Wilkie, 20 years old, a sober, modest son of the manse, came to London from Edinburgh in 1805. He brought with him a couple of pictures, a sound training and great diligence. In 1806 he exhibited The Village Politicians at the Academy to great acclaim. Scotland had produced a Dutch talent – a Teniers or an Ostade ...”

“... de Meun, on discovering the letters they had exchanged in religious life, translated them into French and popularised their story in his Roman de la Rose. One of his characters praises Heloise as peerless among women, but uses their tale all the same to warn men against marriage. A gothic legend recounts that when Heloise was buried beside Abelard, already ...”

“... after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her. The campaign has been waged mostly by women, over the dead ...”

“... the Grand Duchy of Baden was hoping to consolidate the territorial gains it had made under the French empire and to prove itself worthy of a major role in the new Europe. Duchy officials were alarmed, therefore, when they heard that Baron Karl von Drais, a publicity-seeking eccentric who was employed by the Duchy as a forest master, intended to use the ...”

“... to Sabine Rewald, by two sepia drawings of his studio windows with the River Elbe beyond by Caspar David Friedrich. The drawings are exact in their rendering of casements, panes and the gradation of light on bare walls, and careful in their delineation of the distant riverbank. The frugal medium and the impersonal quality of the draughtsmanship give you the ...”

“... The most recent Christmas issue of French Vogue, dedicated to ‘Noël en Musique’, had on its cover a photograph of Kate Moss done up as Ziggy Stardust. The picture is a monument to improbable staying power. It’s more than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous ...”

“... and Peace still hovers over them. Western accounts are more sober, and tend to see things from the French point of view, thanks to the massive amount of available French documentation. They emphasise Napoleon’s mistakes, the effects of winter and the travails of the French soldiers in ...”

“... of previous books spanning multiple genres and forms, and is a long-standing member of Oulipo, the French experimental-writing collective that revels in constraints – the more arbitrary, the better. All novels, of course, are experiments, but the thing that separates a thriller (or any other form with its own section in the bookshop) from ‘literature’ is ...”

“... law generally prevails over democratic discontent in spite of adverse electoral consequences. David Cameron must have looked on in envy: he’d tried to talk tough on immigration without any authority to reduce Britain’s openness to southern Europeans. Merkel meanwhile profited from continuing to talk up German openness while having ensured that Germany ...”

“... images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of ...”

“... whom they take to be nostalgic for the certainties of the self-contained nation state. The French government has cancelled plans to allow non-European residents to vote in local elections; Iain Duncan Smith is trying to drum up support for restricting freedom of movement within the EU. All over the continent, we are told that topics such as immigration ...”

“... but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction. The first three books each provided a snapshot of a particular point in Patrick’s life: his miserable, abused childhood in Provence in Never Mind (1992); his miserable, heroin-addicted twenties in Bad ...”

“... by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book ...”

“... is appointing Crosland.’ He nodded to a handwritten envelope addressed to the President of the French Republic. I knew that it contained a letter declaring his willingness to become President of the European community. We talked for a while, and I sadly conceded that my resistance to his departure from British politics was at an end. A little before six ...”