“... cotton wool. The act was as intimate and warm as the act of sex.’ In 1981, in a letter to his French translator, Alain Delahaye, McGahern describes laying out the brother of a neighbour in the company of a chemist from Dublin who kept adjusting the mouth: ‘I knew this pursuit of perfection could go on all night. The murmurs outside the door were ...”

“... His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s ...”

“... antagonistic values that Voltaire is chosen to represent. Voltaire was rationalist, atheistical, French: ‘Scarcely any one has a larger share of my aversion,’ Coleridge spluttered. Not that you needed to be a Romantic to entertain such patriotic feelings. Dr Johnson felt obliged to take on Voltaire in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... among university lecturers; some of them, like his colleague in the University of Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon (‘Black-Earth’, from his original surname, Schwarzerdt), kept this name for the rest of their lives. In Dr Luther’s case, though, the new surname was also a devout play on words, reflecting a sense of the liberation which came from his ...”

“... first printed in 1514. The names undergo further mutation in Part II under the influence of a 1576 French adaptation of Saxo, becoming ‘Geruthe’ and ‘Fengon’ (King Hamlet, previously Horwendil, becomes Horvendile). Only in Part III do the characters’ names assimilate to Shakespeare’s. Updike also complicates the roles played by the brothers, the ...”

“... the narrow staircase with its wine-red runner, the panel of brass around the hearth, the long French windows in the front room, the laburnum in the back garden and the tennis club behind that. Maxwell said that Brennan’s fiction was distinguished by ‘almost clinical descriptions of states of mind’. The emotions in her stories ...”

“... him – Charles Chaplin. Orson’s view was that he had first thought of the comedy about the French lady-killer Landru, a modern Bluebeard, which in 1947 became Monsieur Verdoux. He had already described its essence in 1941: There is one tableau, and it is the key to the whole film. There is Chaplin, dapper and blithe, clipping the hedges, making his ...”

“... himself as a New Orleans lawyer, cultivated a suavity that went down well in Paris. But the French wouldn’t make a move towards recognition unless Britain led the way. It was Mason’s job to persuade them, and he bungled it. A scion of the Virginia slavocracy, he affected a ‘chomping heartiness’ (in Foreman’s phrase) that didn’t sit well with ...”

“... Its own miracle workers were, after all, still hard at work. During the Second World War, the French Augustinian nun Yvonne Beauvais was famous as an accomplished bilocator, meaning she could be in two places at once, a feat that had been common among Renaissance saints. (After the war, she was decorated by de Gaulle for her work on behalf of the ...”

“... and Germany careening by in the rain. Coffee in Albert, a quick gander in the drizzle at the French war memorial in the town square, then on to the giant Lutyens monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. It was mid-morning, and we were the only people there apart from a sullen group of French lycée students ...”

“... lexicographers defining frisson seem unable to avoid ‘shudder’), we can propose a debt to the French, likely in these years when English poets were influenced, as Eliot was, by Baudelaire and others. Indeed Eliot, rejecting the 1890s reading of Baudelaire, had made himself the major exponent of that author as a fierce moralist as well as the poet of ...”

“... Gospel According to Matthew (1964), which featured the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the disciple Philip, the novelist Natalia Ginzburg as Mary of Bethany and Susanna, Pasolini’s mother, as the older Virgin Mary. A few years later, Pasolini wrote warmly about Morante’s Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (1968), a dramatic poetry cycle which has just been ...”

“... million issued during the pandemic went to Computacenter, founded by the prominent Tory donor Sir Philip Hulme.) But EdTech platforms had been creeping into English schools for some years. Spending per pupil in England has been falling steadily since 2009; over roughly the same period, the gap between private and state school spending has more than ...”

“... and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’. Ferguson himself is homo ...”

“... closer to the outlines of Theroux’s history. Neither book is imaginable without the precedent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981) – in which Zuckerman’s succès de scandale Carnovsky stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which it is hard to find the exit. Roth’s ...”