“... a year in a labour camp before Czernowitz came under Soviet control again in 1943. He moved to France in 1948 and settled in Paris, where he continued to write poetry in his native German. In 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine. Celan was not literally a poet of the epitaph, but there is a sense in which his poems, with their stress on negation, their ...”

“... down Neville Chamberlain. When, in September 1939, Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, rose to reply to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak for England!’ (In Alan Bennett’s Forty ...”

“... the entirely fictional one of the monastery of San Michele in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Since the layout of the library is so important to the plot of the novel, it has been possible for fans to count the number of rooms, calculate the number of shelves, and estimate the number of volumes the library contained – it comes to about ...”

“... if not Ronald Reagan. Hoping to reclaim the prodigal for the theatre, the Broadway producer Billy Rose addressed an open letter to him: ‘Listen, Thunder-in-the-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re Senator Pepper, D.W. Griffith or Kupperman the quiz kid?’ He did undertake theatrical projects after this, notably a ...”

“... two possible novels, asynchronous with one another and orientated on opposite geographical axes (France-America, England-Australia), but each wholly or partly inspired by the expedition of a French nobleman: in the first case, Tocqueville, in the second, Freycinet. Perhaps it was the French connection that suggested to Carey the idea of folding the novels ...”

“... antidote, a large irony given Wodehouse’s career after being captured by the Germans in France (where he’d been living when war broke out) as a colleague of Joyce’s on the German side. A good part of Joyce’s appeal lay in an on-air personality that projected a dangerous sense of fun: ‘And where is the Ark Royal?’ he would regularly ...”

“... of a votive cult among bebop obsessives. Soon after his blurry end, aged 34, a fond graffito rose and sprouted all over New York: Bird Lives! Parker’s sad extinction released myriad afterlives: musical colossus, modernist exemplar, contested emblem of racial politics, finally even the recipient of the paste crown of a posthumous Hollywood ...”

“... of three referendums which challenged the grand designs of Brussels have been ignored – in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Greece in 2015 – and three have led to a second vote: Denmark in 1993; Ireland in 2002 and 2009.) Mediapart likes to stress the undemocratic nature of the EU: ‘stolen from its citizens’ by ‘the markets’, ‘finance ...”

“... a massive undertaking’. As an intellectual dignitary, he was guaranteed a warm reception in France when The Patagonian Hare was published three years ago by Gallimard; Philippe Sollers called it a ‘metaphysical event’. It’s an unbridled piece of self-celebration, dictated to his assistant editor at Les Temps modernes in what Lanzmann calls his ...”

“... clandestine eroticism come into the open, in a carnival of the damned. A convict called Broadway Rose put on a sex show, and the prison’s ‘boy-girls’ offered their services in cells covered by red curtains. In Himes’s ‘To What Red Hell’, it’s the fire that enables this liberation of desire, before extinguishing it: ‘Oh, Lawd, ma man’s ...”

“... one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The emergence of the compagnonnages – and their relative ubiquity ...”

“... which remains his most widely performed piece, was born of a different catastrophe: the fall of France in 1940. Mobilised as a stretcher-bearer a year earlier, Messiaen was captured by German soldiers in the woods near Nancy, and interned at Stalag VIIIA in Görlitz, Silesia. The conditions – the cold, the meagre rations – were gruelling, but a Catholic ...”

“... his lectern.The message worked well (some said too well) and Johnson’s own satisfaction ratings rose sharply after he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In mid-April, two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of June, only half of ...”

“... is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is ...”

“... they had at the same time to write like men, and even – following the example of George Sand in France – to adopt male names, like ‘Currer Bell’ and ‘George Eliot’. No wonder their achievement had been meagre: a handful of classics and ‘innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in textbooks … novels that lie scattered like ...”