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“... my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didn’t talk about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... Fashion modelling and high society swiftly ensued. The only thing she had done before was to go to France right after leaving school, chaperoned by her French teacher; but she soon ditched Mademoiselle to remain alone in Paris. With her parents’ permission and financial support, she stayed on to learn the rudiments of stage design and lighting, along with ...”

“... as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since ...”

“... Ironweed is about Albany, capital of the State of New York. Julian Barnes writes about the France of Gustave Flaubert, as discussed in an irrational, pedantic manner by a British admirer of Flaubert’s work. Anita Desai, daughter of a German mother and a Bengali father, writes about the world of Indian poets, a very male (not macho) group devoted to ...”

“... threat: in the west the Greeks, in the east the Armenians, and in the south the victorious Allies, France and Britain. They had responded to Mustafa Kemal’s appeal, addressed to ‘fine people, with honour and respect, Turks and Kurds ... brothers around the institution of the Caliphate’. No sooner had the war been won, however, than the basis of Muslim ...”

“... the bid without recourse to questionable, not to say illegal, means. We know that since at least France 1998, bribes, presents and favours have been handed out by every successful World Cup host. The Sunday Times investigation into the bid concluded that Qatar is no different. As for alcohol, weak beer from one of Fifa’s sponsors will be available around ...”

“... ubiquitous in Italian writing on the topic and can also be found in medieval texts from England, France, the Iberian peninsula and, slightly later, from Germany. Stories provide instruction for those without access to texts, as Gregory had explained, and images are to be venerated but not worshipped, because that would be idolatry. This was the position ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... loudspeakers on the underside of the aircraft, through which might emerge’, according to David Pascoe, ‘passages from Memories of Lenin, interspersed with exhortations about the Five-Year Plan’. Eighty red lights on the fuselage allowed it to flash slogans to the remotest regions as it swooped across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner ...”

“... and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period’. (This wasn’t hyperbole, since there are more than two thousand named characters in the Comédie ...”

“... feminine nom de plume to avoid military censorship, and that he lives ‘in exile’ in southern France. The impression given is that Khadra is a dissident, rather than a staunch defender of the Algerian army, an institution that bears considerable responsibility for the country’s descent into war. Khadra is a talented writer, but he isn’t a ...”

“... look like the latest novel from Gallimard) is a sequence of ten short stories about the British in France; and given this theme, they turn, of necessity, on interpretation, often in the most down-to-earth sense of the word. ‘Experiment’ relates how the narrator’s Uncle Freddy got involved with the French Surrealists. It was a favourite story of his and ...”

“... Barrett, who died of cancer in 1961 – Barrett was nearly 16. (There was Roger Waters, too, and David Gilmour – who’d replace Barrett within moments, almost, of the band’s success. Both were Cambridge boys. Both, Willis tells us, had messed around with paint pots in a late-toddler phase in the same Saturday morning art club as Barrett at Homerton ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”