“... Margaret in a manner that I can only describe as fulsome. I was observing through a chink in the french window draperies. They appeared to be scantily clad. It was not a sight calculated to refresh the spirit. I had difficulty restraining myself from rapping on the window. Croucher’s bloody-mindedness is gradually revealed as he tells us with disgust ...”

“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... In some cases the viewer becomes like the figure that stands dwarfed in the foreground of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, which is reproduced in the catalogue alongside Kleist’s reaction to it: ‘It was like someone having their eyelids cut off.’ Even landscape can be painfully revealing. The German connection is important, but if one lists ...”

“... By the end​ of the 1980s, two formerly arcane disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier you’d have had to go to Paris or New Haven to hear about. Now you could pick up the rudiments of it in any university town, and though there was still an exciting whiff of controversy around ‘theory’, a topic known to make right-wing broadsheets and Oxbridge fellows see red, there were many well-written bluffer’s guides, headed up by Terry Eagleton’s ...”

“... of brotherhood. And for that ritual a gunpowder drink was essential.The formula, recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point ...”

“... of a bedside table defaced by cigarette burns. This fantasy has some bearing on the task facing David Sylvester in writing this marvellous book. He has discovered a room behind the wardrobe. In 1912, Magritte, 13 at the time, lost his mother who, after several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, managed to drown herself. According to Magritte’s ...”

“... outlook. The Eisenhower family background was a typical American failure story. His father, David, like each of his siblings, had been set up on marriage by his father with a piece of property of his own and a small amount of capital. Raising a mortgage on the property, he then plunged into business; in two years it had folded, the mortgage was ...”

“... When the Paisiello portrait was exhibited in the Salon of 1791 it won extravagant praise from David, who thought a man could not have done better. The Queen of Naples herself insisted on a portrait. ‘This princess of whom so much ill has been spoken and written, was affectionate by nature and very simple in her private life; her generosity was truly ...”

“... into an inspired chronicle of encounters and exchanges with writers and artists from the Egyptian-French Joyce Mansour to the African American David Hammons. The exhibition as a whole, too, is the result of multiple meetings with many contributors: a collective research project reminiscent of early Surrealist enquêtes into ...”

“... The same week as that unwanted encounter with European produce, a near disaster was suffered by 23 French holidaymakers, some of whom suffered facial cuts as their Dover-bound coach collided with a Danish TIR lorry at Harbledown. On another occasion the A2 was blocked when a ‘Turkey-bound’ lorry loaded with machinery parked at the side of the road, then ...”

“... it made for a fairly plodding historical mode. Of those I know, the German (Bernhard Duhr) and the French (Henri Fouqueray) did a good job: they fed something gritty into their national histories and were honest about confusion and infighting among Jesuits. By contrast, the Italian history became entangled in the history of the Society in general, and has got ...”

“... startling as it is, will be familiar to readers of Leo Bersani’s earlier work. A professor of French and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, Bersani burst on the scene of gay studies somewhat unexpectedly in 1987 with a ferociously eloquent essay on Aids and homophobia entitled ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’; Homos represents the long-awaited elaboration of ...”

“... dull’ and believed Turner was ‘mad’, waved his stick at a Cézanne and, on seeing the French Impressionists in the Tate Gallery Extension, trumpeted to the Queen: ‘Here’s something to make you laugh, May.’ Nor is the King’s boorishness excused by arguing that Queen Mary’s own cultural interests were less broad than is popularly ...”

“... from European integration, though for now the prospects look pretty remote (and the example of French resistance to American culture is a salutary reminder that there is little modern governments can do about it anyway). It may also be that the British state is about to break up into lesser nation states, each of which may require government help in ...”

“... Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is debate over the degree to which Shakespeare intends irony at the King’s expense at this point in the cycle, but there is only a slim case to be made ...”