“... arris, which careful craftsmen will plane down into a chamfer (the origins of these terms are French, ‘arête’ and ‘chanfrein’ respectively) to prevent cutting the fingers that will be drawn irresistibly to its crisp edge. The arris is not, of course, to be confused with an arras or embroidered hanging, through which the unfortunate Polonius gets ...”

“... its capital. The town has no characteristics except efficiency and conceit and feeble imitation of French artistic vice, where the vice is doubled and the art dropped.’ Having got half-way through Faust Part One, he reckoned it ‘more a wonderful collection of very good remarks than a dramatic masterpiece’ (to his parents, 27 March 1914). After seeing a ...”

“... happening at once, nobody has time to take much notice – this was all said in the 36 lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. While nobody would deny that Coover and his contemporaries opened our horizons twenty years ago, I would see Gerald’s Party as the work of a writer imprisoned in his own success. If this were to be the last of the ...”

“... stone’s throw of his premises is a pharmacist (to whom Mr Sweeney addresses frequent queries), a French bakery for croissants, a florist (from whom Mr Sweeney purchased the wee cacti which became the title poem of his most recent and acclaimed collection), his local public house, the Lamb (for the usual wetgoods), a dry cleaner’s, two coffee shops, a ...”

“... to expect of this astonishing war. ‘It’s not as unfair as you think,’ advised an experienced French colleague. Accreditation took a few minutes from South Vietnam and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy ...”

“... to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I ...”

“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... of man’, they did not mean the ‘rights of mankind’. This was conspicuous in the French Revolution, when a fervent revolutionary could write: ‘Ignorance in women is infinitely useful: it keeps them subordinate; it makes them concentrate on the necessary tasks of the household. If you make women more educated, men will be less so.’ An ...”

“... up new and fresh. When Look back in anger opened at the Royal Court, the warmest reaction was Philip Hope-Wallace’s ‘spinsterly condescension’ – Osborne has always at his command the exact, skewering phrase – but then the Sunday papers came out. Ken Tynan called it a ‘minor miracle’ and praised it in these peculiar terms: ‘I doubt if I ...”

“... 1868, and Saint Matthew by the same translator, London, 1869; Saint Matthew in Susu (spoken in French Guinea, West Africa), probably translated by J.H.A. Dupont (a West Indian of African descent, from Codrington College, Barbados), Oxford, 1869. Most exotic of all are those Bibles that are now only objects, such as the Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum ...”

“... and for the effect of rendering into Latin testimony given in a native language (English or Norman French, or in Cragh’s case Welsh), illustrating and probing the variety of attitudes reflected in witnesses’ responses to rigorous grilling by the commissioners. In the second half of the book Bartlett broadens the scope of his study to explore the background ...”

“... moulder in rage and ennui when the head of household, Arnold, absconds to Paris with his new French girlfriend. The abandoned wife, J., swallows ‘fistfuls of Valium’ while staring bleakly out of the window. Monique, the young au pair, looking ‘much older and more careworn than when she first arrived’, is disliked by her charge, four-year-old ...”

“... has grown up here. He is well educated. He reads, writes and speaks English, Italian, Spanish and French, with perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly conversant with it; knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires of talking of her illustrious career. He dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite. Negroes are ...”

“... firmly forward to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets, to early ecumenicalists, to Bacon, to the French Academicians, to Descartes and to Leibniz. This may sound forbidding, but anyone who has encountered her Art of Memory will know that she provides wonderfully unfussy guidance through unfamiliar territory of great intrinsic fascination and intellectual ...”

“... poetry would be improved by acquiring, as Pound recommended, the virtues of good prose, preferably French. Stallworthy submitted the Newdigate poem under the pseudonym ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’, but that is the only recognition of Eliot I find in his poetic career. If this is true, I would like to hear more about it; how a poet of Stallworthy’s openness ...”