“... facts about him remain unclear. Did he face a death sentence at the age of sixteen? Was he in the French Foreign Legion? In the months before his death, in 1991, was he really being investigated for a war crime? Did MI6 finance his first business in order to recruit Soviet scientists? Was he a KGB asset? Did he have a financial relationship with Jeffrey ...”

“... Novels of B.S. Johnson, a very well-informed book, was published by Paupers’ Press in 2000, and Philip Tew’s B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester), a heavier, more philosophical study, followed in 2001. Tew projects onto Johnson his special interests, which involve many darkly erudite meditations by the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. Johnson is credited ...”

“... Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), a work which Johnson drew on for the Dictionary, the French Encyclopédie, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), and the more specialised works studied by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of Music, for example, Joshua Reynolds’s ...”

“... is that this perspective is tempered by a strong cosmopolitanism, at least as it extends to French, German and Italian historical thought. One of Murray’s arguments concerns the intellectually limited and derivative character of anglophone historical writing, which in his view has failed to develop any theoretical or conceptual sophistication except ...”

“... Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, first published in French two years ago, begins with a kind of stutter surrounding the writer’s end. The book’s Introduction, prologue and opening chapter all invoke his death, as if it were a threshold that had to be crossed but couldn’t be crossed without returning ...”

“... experiments. But we had to wait for the end of the century. Robert Wilson, designer/director of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear.’ Some of the tales that Rée ...”

“... to possess the early fruits of Elizabeth’s pedagogical formation: her translation from the French of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the religious poem composed by Marguerite d’Angoulême, the favourite sister of the King of France, which was her 1545 New Year’s gift for Catherine Parr (she was not yet 13!), and which Starkey calls ...”

“... Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger later attended Stonyhurst College; the Claimant was barely literate. The best that could be said for him was that he waggled his eyebrows in a way that reminded his ...”

“... In June 1940​ a French lieutenant issued false passes. ‘Sauve qui peut,’ he said. ‘Il faut se débrouiller.’ Get out of this as best you can. Albert Hirschman would say that he’d been a débrouillard all his life. He’d left Berlin in 1933, sought an education in Paris and London, fought in Spain, worked in Trieste, fled back to France, enlisted, and with the rest of his émigré platoon now had to avoid arrest by Vichy ...”

“... refuses – in 1242, in 1245, in 1248, in 1252, in 1255. Whether the money is destined for a French expedition, or for his fantasy project to place his younger son, Edmund, on the throne of Sicily, or for the crusade which he plans to lead alongside his brother-in-law Louis (but which, unlike Louis and his own son Edward, he never does), every time ...”

“... proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ‘dark-haired children at play’, the      moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark ... of the war’s early days. No one thought it would be a ...”

“... This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The ...”

“... grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... numbers; it should also contain no titles, which leads one to wonder how Princess Tiaamii passed. French names were officially liberated in 1993, and in Spain, in 2007, the principle, at least, of freedom in naming was recognised; a century and a half after the rise of the Nellies in America and Britain, a Spanish couple can now register a child under the ...”

“... I was approaching 13: the huge anti-Suez demonstration in 1956, when the targets were British and French imperialism, and Israel of course – and it was amazing. The university students came to our school to have it closed so we could join the demo, and the principal, Brother Henderson, closed it for the day. Because there was no martial law, no military ...”