“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than two centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on our vocabularies: the denarius gives us the French denier, the Spanish dinero and the Arabic dinar, as well as the ‘d’ that stood for a pre-decimal British penny. (The £ symbol is a stylised capital L, from the Latin libra via the French livre, the Roman pound from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... modern art dovetailed nicely with the trends of the time. Where American artists like Philip Guston or Jackson Pollock had once made murals that might decorate a new post office or public housing project, now they were painting abstracts that could appear in the lobby of an office block. Some recently excavated work – such as Towards a New ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... emerged after the war as the most militant European intellectual to denounce Soviet Communism (French admirers credited his masterpiece, the novel Darkness at Noon, with preventing a Communist victory in the 1946 referendum on a new constitution), and his writings – journalism, novels, manifestos and memoirs – made him world famous. In a fourth ...”

“... for the Americans, a ‘typically practical symbology – not the lofty social contract of the French, but a pride in their competence to develop and use a resource’. My sense is that there was considerably more mix-and-match than Starr allows. There were differences between national traditions, and these differences suggest deeper differences in ...”

“... whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every ...”

“... in its way, theoretically sophisticated work it is. Watt cites Lukács in German and Durkheim in French, alongside works by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the ...”