“... to abandon their Leninist-Maoist stance and to take up a rhetoric not far removed from that of the French New Right. Barthes maintained a certain canny ambivalence with regard to his radicalised colleagues and admirers. Derrida took issue more directly, arguing (in a well-known interview) that much of what passed for ‘materialist’ dialectic still bore the ...”

“... family is much older: a manuscript dated to the 1440s records it as a local tradition. In 1533 a French poet called Maurice Scève, a disciple of Petrarch, announced that he had discovered Laura’s tomb in Avignon. It was unmarked but allegedly contained a casket in which were found a handwritten sonnet in the style of Petrarch (albeit on an off-day) and a ...”

“... sense, the popular success of Górecki constitutes a threat distinctly different from that of a Philip Glass or a Steve Reich – not to mention Michael Nyman, the most candidly and astutely ‘commercial’ of Post-Modern British composers. Even at the lowest level, the real benefits (if not the cost-benefits) of performing Górecki’s Third are quite ...”

“... also an internationalist, deeply hostile to the Little Englandism of many of his peers, notably Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote a book about Czeslaw Milosz, translated many poems from Polish and Russian. In his memoir, These the Companions, he describes what he improbably calls F.R. Leavis’s charm, but the hero of the book is the Californian ...”

“... and the almost total absence of quotation from, or reference to, novels; the exception is Philip Roth’s The Breast. Yalom notes the works of a few Renaissance poets who wrote blazons describing the breast of the ideal mistress (among her other attributes), but otherwise ignores literature in favour of the graphic arts (anything from Rembrandt to ...”

“... until you see, far off, the secondary Downtown of the Galleria area, and the glinting monolith of Philip Johnson’s Transco Tower. Johnson is perhaps the most conspicuous architect in the Houston cityscape. He was brought in by the Menils, the city’s great artistic benefactors, and his later career is interestingly represented here. First there is the ...”

“... from the door in Rome when, with the fall of Napoleon, Ingres lost the patronage of the departing French Imperial administration. Many of the Grand Tourists who took home an Ingres drawing as a memento were young English men and women. These drawings – of single figures, sister and sister, brother and sister, husband and wife – would make better ...”

“... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign ...”

“... then waiting almost thirty years before releasing another. Living in a Flemish port, he wrote in French: his liberal parents having migrated to Antwerp from Brussels. He was a poet, but he had to secure some source of income. October Long Sunday emerged from the tedium of military service and lengthy spells of convalescence. The state of enforced suspension ...”

“... a minor in Greek and art history, Nochlin went to Columbia, where she specialised in 19th-century French painting (her doctorate was on Courbet). By the time Feigen posed the question to her in 1970, Nochlin had given birth to her first child, a daughter; become a feminist; and organised her first class on ‘Women and Art’ at Vassar, where she had returned ...”

“... to name the family dog Quintus, and dismissed War and Peace after a hundred pages because the French passages were annoying. On the superiority of bakers to writers, he has this to say: ‘A cake is a one-draft story. You don’t get to revise.’ ‘Pass-me-ups’ is what he calls the cashmere scarves that his mother inherited after his suicide. He ...”

“... in the 18th century, and Isabel Rivers’s essay explores how influential the Protestant Dissenter Philip Doddridge was with his monumental paraphrase of and commentary on the KJB, so huge that it was only posthumously completed two decades after he issued the first parts of it in 1738. Doddridge’s work was much plagiarised, and it might well have burst into ...”

“... Crisis was underwritten by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and A. Philip Randolph and George Schuyler’s Messenger had the support of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Yeats’s magazines Beltaine and Samhain were issued to provide publicity and explanatory material for performances at the Irish Literary Theatre and the ...”

“... and ‘pictures’ rather than conventional theorems and proofs. As the historians of economics Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent have shown, however, it’s Mandelbrot’s relations to economics that are of greatest interest. Particularly fascinating is the way in which he was first embraced and then rejected by financial economics. The latter is a ...”

“... of the mix of Europeans who had begun to settle in the region. It was, after all, the collapse of French power in India following Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 which effectively opened it up to British dominance: as Browning was to put it, ‘the man Clive – he fought Plassey, spoiled the clever/foreign game,/Conquered and annexed and ...”