“... and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying ...”

“... in theories of socialism and was perfectly familiar with abstract thought. With her competence in French and German, she must have read many of the same books that Dostoevsky read. But the kind of questions her characters put to themselves and to each other, though sometimes lofty, never cast doubt on basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the ...”

“... in mind – feature in practically every round-up of suspects: figures such as Clement Greenberg, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling. But outdoing them all in his credentials for the title-role is Wilson, the freelance writer who never held a regular academic position and who, it is claimed, wrote authoritatively on questions of literature, culture and ...”

“... to produce a future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George ...”

“... in his office and in the same way the pupils of another candidate for secular sainthood, the French philosopher Simone Weil, saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s. One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The ...”

“... validate my experience of reading, and relishing, the novel London Bridge. How had the trepanned French maniac achieved such a rapturous sense of the city’s psychogeography – Willesden to Soho to Rotherhithe? I was introduced at the desk, in the way that one is, to an American writer who told me that he’d heard about my novels, even picked up ...”

“... is Emma Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903): the story, set during the Terror, of a beautiful French actress married to a wealthy but vapid British baronet. The actress despises her husband and is greatly taken by stories of a nameless Englishman who has been rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine; every time he spirits another royalist to England, the ...”

“... Her Majesty’s, the Lyceum and Covent Garden, often presided over by foreign conductors (usually French), and attended by a youthful and convivial audience, who stood up and walked around while the music was being played (hence the name), and were charged less than they would have been for a formal concert. The programmes were appropriately light and ...”

“... in 1942. That same year it became the only Sunday newspaper not to cover the Allied landings in French North Africa; when the news broke, David rang the paper at 2.30 on a Sunday morning to find that practically everyone had gone home. There was a lot to change. In 1945, when he first began to work full-time for the paper, he told his mother that once ...”

“... and my job was to promote Anglo-German relations.Had you done German at school?No, not at all. French and Latin, I’d done. In Germany I had to write the scripts for a radio programme; I had to write local-boy stories, stories which commemorated a proud day in the life of Blank from Blank. Such and such a grand person came to visit etc, and then you took ...”

“... an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates. While Dubuffet’s term is quite specific, the English term ‘outsider art’ is often applied more ...”

“... it featured Hamlet, dated from a decade or more earlier; it seems to have taken its events from a French prose narrative of the 1570s, which itself translated and adapted a Norse legend embedded in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Danish History. The original Norse legend is very brutal and very bloody. The further source or impulse of Elizabethan revenge ...”

“... long after the war ended in 1945. Germany had former Nazis as its chancellor and president. The French president François Mitterrand had been an apparatchik in the Vichy regime. As late as 1992, Kurt Waldheim was president of Austria despite there being evidence of his involvement in Nazi atrocities.Even in the United States, there was ‘public silence ...”

“... often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in ...”

“... precisely thanks to postmodernism. That’s the idea behind Borges’s story of Pierre Menard, a French Symbolist who is led by his Symbolist background to produce a text identical to Don Quixote. Borges’s story, however, relies on our historical knowledge of Cervantes’s existence. The incredibly funny, thought-provoking claim that ‘Cervantes’s text ...”