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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dated (provisionally) 5 April 1919, is to G. Jean-Aubry (a future biographer). The original, in French, is transcribed, annotated and translated: Dear Friend. Would you like to come for lunch on Saturday, if that suits you, or by the 4.30 p.m. train? Get your ticket for Wye because at the moment our motor-car is at the coachbuilder’s and it will be ...”

“... Philip Larkin once wondered what it would be like for a lover to step inside his skull. ‘She’d be stopping her ears,’ he decided, ‘against the incessant recital/Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms.’ Stepping inside the mind (or prose) of W.G. Sebald elicits a similar reaction – at any rate, it is always a relief to step outside again ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all, the poem is a translation: Morgan has also translated from Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Dutch and ancient Greek, as well as (with a crib) from Khmer, Armenian and Hungarian. He has turned English into Scots and, in his version of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, turned English into English. In his original work, too, Morgan likes his ...”

“... the hunt, the latest fashions in dress and in shooting, the Hungarian predilection for all things French and English; the management of balls and suppers, the hierarchy of the participants, the honour involved in being elotancos, or master of the revels. The novels describe different kinds of gambling and gambler, techniques in breeding and breaking ...”

“... the hysterical tributes’ to Princess Diana – and both died in Paris. Burke predicted that the French Revolution would end in despotism, and Rosa Luxemburg predicted the same of the Russian Revolution. But wait: they have more in common than that. Luxemburg’s favourite pseudonym was ‘Junius’, which, intriguingly enough, was also the pseudonym ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... leaders, as is largely the case in America. Tony Blair’s celebrated ‘project’, guided by Philip Gould, dismantled the rambling institutions that formed the Labour coalition and turned Labour into whatever the leader wanted it to be, even, in Blair’s case, a continuance of Thatcherism. In disempowering county and city government, long the power base ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully-cut suits lounging on sofas in French-window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat intimate.’ Knighthoods nothing: actors should be decorated for gallantry. This ...”

“... palindromes (the longest of which, by Perec, is more than 5000 letters long); and ulcérations (in French) and ‘threnodials’ (in English), which employ only the 11 most common letters of the language. As Jacques Roubaud, one of the group’s most gifted practitioners, observed in 1991: ‘An OuLiPian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which ...”

“... oil lamps to mark notable public occasions. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 saw a display outside the French ambassador’s residence where the figures of France and England stood united between the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Concord’. Unfortunately, some sailors in the crowd whose spelling was weak felt insulted at the implication they had been conquered and ...”