“... our trees and houses, have longer histories than our country. My family home in Bouillon, on the French border, is decked with photographs of relatives who were born before Belgium was created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian ...”

“... in Ashbery, critics of poetry have been helpfully able to find that viciousness ready to hand in Philip Larkin’s verse, especially since his death in 1985. Ashbery’s first successful volume, Some Trees, came out in 1956; Larkin’s first fully achieved collection had appeared the year before. Nearly twenty years later, when High Windows was published in ...”

“... as false and absurd doctrines.The ‘cas Messiaen’ was the most violent controversy to erupt in French music since the premiere of The Rite of Spring. While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ...”

“... once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure.’ 17 February. Catch part of BBC2’s celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first ...”

“... at the dogmatic approach of Fouque and her feminist collaborators.In 1975, Akerman appeared on a French television programme to promote a women’s film festival in Paris. Later, she made a point of refusing invitations from feminist, gay and lesbian, and Jewish film festivals – this may be the only recording of her speaking with other women about a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dealers, calls Thomas at home to tell him which books she’s found, and visits a friend called Philip Maurel in his shop, where he sells ancient coins. The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio ...”

“... John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond Chandler, who sacked her for calling the Philip Marlowe of The Long Goodbye ‘too Christ-like and sentimental’. She would be hard on Matthiessen’s fiction as well. On receiving 35 pages of a novel in progress, Baumgarten wrote to him: ‘Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this 150 years ...”

“... 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 ...”