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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not varied – with a pathos so homely and total that it brings tears to the eyes. Beckett and Pinter have nothing on Patrick Hamilton at his best: in fact, beside him they seem ...”

“... lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview cited, which ...”

“... from home? When national stereotypes are contradicted, nobody knows what to say. If he were French or from a Latin country the papers would be full of stuff about his being detached, laid-back, shruggy. As it is, they reach for the received-opinion file – which doesn’t have anything in it about the not at all rare phenomenon of the New Age German ...”

“... various bodily functions, and re-places Oe squarely in the existential tradition, to which, as a French scholar, he remains indebted (Japanese critics, however, also make much of his American-style narratives, including the ‘Americanisms’ of his Japanese). If he is not exactly a realist, he is not really a Modernist either (despite the fireworks of his ...”

“... the snick and swing of tense shift could get away with the opening of the 1993 story ‘Comet’: Philip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been a while since Adele had married and she wore white. It is the most radical economy to convey a life encompassing two marriages by repeating the ...”

“... a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice versa. For the first sixty or so pages it is possible to read Arabesques as an intelligently contemporary attempt at ...”

“... narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, when Philip of Hesse’s mercenaries crushed the peasants led by Müntzer in one of the last battles of the German Peasants’ War. Müntzer was captured, tortured – confessing his heretical belief that ‘omnia sunt communia,’ ‘everything belongs to ...”