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“... British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s huge history of the country between 1945 and 1951. It is difficult for anyone familiar only with the shimmering prosperity of contemporary Western Europe to realise just what it was like in the years immediately after the Second World War. In ...”

“... much conviction (which will make the appearance of conviction all the more important). The recent French Presidential election perhaps offers a glimpse of the spectacle to come, not so much in the success of the Far Right, though maybe in that as well, but in the crashing of gears as the democratic machine moves at improbable speed from the personal to the ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... token, Mrs Thatcher may believe that Magna Carta secured liberty more effectively than did the French Revolution. But there has as yet been no revival of a British history emphasising native constitutional achievements. Indeed, some of the most unabashed Tory historians seem far more anxious to cast doubt on the importance of traditional constitutional ...”

“... the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from Aboriginal languages as well as modern verse in English by poets from a range of racial and ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... dynasty. And it was part of that sexual magnetism that Anne, having spent most of her life in French-speaking courts, in Brussels and Paris, was to all intents and purposes French. Lancelot de Carles wrote that ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ...”

“... mid-1950s. At a campfire Father Tassin, a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa. Saint-Denis begins to ...”

“... missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with Welsh forces, headed for and captured Carmarthen. It then marched through South Wales into Herefordshire and the Midlands, halting only at Woodbury Hill – so the story goes – a bare eight miles from ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s work, though I gather he’s big in the US thesis market. Yet the ICA devoted three evenings in ...”

“... them. No page is without these supports, cited in whatever language the source employed, Latin, French, German and occasionally English. They are a shade discursive at times, to show how much the author likes doing them, but nothing is dodged or shirked. Not surprisingly, publication of this book is simultaneous in the USA and Britain, while ...”

“... engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical ...”

“... This will be a happy year if everyone who owns a Rabelais gives it a good read. The French have made 1984 ‘L’ Année Rabelais’, treating it as the 500th anniversary of his birth. Glasgow (which has one of the world’s best collections of Gargantua and Pantagruel) got in early, celebrating it last year. But 1983 was Luther year ...”