“... most of them were originally written in English, although he also wrote many letters in French during that time, and they form the main part of quite a different selection, Lettres d’ Amérique, published in France in 1984. Broadly speaking, they fall into the following categories: Gripping social correspondence of the ‘Thank you for your ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”

“... in the Rain’ (flu-defying splashes in puddles), ‘I Got Rhythm’ (Kelly teaching French kids how to dance like aeroplanes and ‘chu-chu trains’), an instrumental in It’s Always Fair Weather (three soldiers crashing rhythmically around the streets with enormous trash-can lids on their shoes). It was an endless party, a crazy magic show ...”

“... of artists are ubiquitous, but those of art historians are not. Yve-Alain Bois, the pre-eminent French art historian of his generation, narrates his own beginning in this book about his key encounters with artists, theorists and curators. Born in 1952, Bois travels with his mother and little brother from a small town near Bordeaux to Paris (he thinks he was ...”

“... all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

“... that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to which Netanyahu had privately given his approval. Never mind the Americans’ frequent warnings about the dangers of escalation, and their stated desire to avoid a confrontation with Iran. For ...”

“... Hardly any junior slam winners go on to triumph at senior level (Marin Čilić, who won the French Open boys’ title in 2005, is the most recent). Federer turned pro the next day, playing the Swiss Open in Gstaad, where he was defeated in straight sets by the Argentine veteran Lucas Arnold Ker. ‘It never crossed my mind that “This guy is going to ...”

“... were using African green monkey cells to amplify the Sabin vaccines, while their colleagues in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were apparently using cells from baboons (and perhaps other species, too) to amplify the Pasteur Institute vaccines of Pierre Lepine. In Stanleyville, they had the Lindi ...”

“... complicated and turbulent period in Naples’s history, as it was catapulted from Spanish rule to French, monarchy to republic and back again, by turns occupied, liberated, formally united with Sicily and, after 1830, subject to the first stirrings of the Risorgimento. Brewer’s laconic allusions to the historical context are more tantalising than ...”

“... One side (clearly the Brits) is clad in stripped-down battledress, and the other (presumably French) is in dark shorts and white jerseys. The only spectators we can see are a cluster of British soldiers, one of whom stands behind a single anti-aircraft gun mounted on a flimsy looking tripod. He seems to have his eyes on the game, not the sky. Anything ...”

“... the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a vanished ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”

“... thousand pages in its English edition. They were to be followed by two sequels: one concerned with French politics, culture and society, the other with external relations. This quartet on ‘Identity’ was then to be completed with two further works, respectively on the ‘Birth’ and the ‘Destiny’ of France, in which Braudel planned to re-totalise the ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”