“... the family lived in the ‘style of millionaire paupers’, and care was taken to give the young David Cornwell the best of public school educations, and a thorough grounding in the codes of upper-class Englishness. The son of a crook, Cornwell was brought up a gent. By his own account, the young Cornwell, subjected to these strange contradictions, ‘became ...”

“... the whole world more barbarous than that custom of these coasters in the west of England.’David Cressy, a historian of early modern Britain, wants to rescue these customs from such condescension. Coastal folk were not the immoral ‘wreckers’ of 18th-century myths, luring ships onto rocks with false lights; nor were they the proletarian heroes of ...”

“... in three of the most brilliant chapters in her new book – after Freud but not for Freud. David Aberbach, by contrast, is oddly impressed by how much Great Writers in the past knew about loss without having read John Bowlby. If new disciplines like psychoanalysis thrive initially on fantasies of purity, they can only be sustained by what looks like ...”

“... of misquoting ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace’). The translations from the French are slovenly: in a dedication an English woman should not write and an English-speaking French woman would not write, ‘To my husband, who I would love even if he were not my husband’ – Who whom? Would ...”

“... Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?’ wrote J.M. Keynes of David Lloyd George in 1919. ‘How can I convey to the reader ... any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character ...”

“... in more than one language), mentioning the German Japanese writer Yoko Tawada and the French Norwegian (based in London) Caroline Bergvall alongside that earlier, more self-confident polyglottist, Ezra Pound. Perloff finds a precursor for all this in Walter Benjamin, who during the 1930s collected thousands of quotations (mostly in ...”

“... that he stood on top of the Vendôme Column in place of his uncle’s statue, he was struck, as David Baguley points out in Napoleon III and His Regime, not by the glory but by the loneliness. In Ham, he wrote a pamphlet on ‘L’Extinction du paupérisme’, explaining, in effect, how much better everything would be if he could just be allowed to get on ...”

“... looked burdened, his eyes heavily pouched, his shoulders sagging, a cigarette (two cigarettes in David Levine’s caricatures) always in his hand, a man wearied by liberalism’s failures, American literature’s failures. Grinberg recounts a fine moment early in his career. In 1936, Trilling was informed by the English Department that as a Marxist, a ...”

“... was in its interests to join, a different logic had taken hold. Without British involvement, the French had concluded that the only way to contain Germany was to go further and faster in binding the nations of Europe together. McTague calls it ‘the eternal paradox – or genius – of European integration: to manage Germany’s core economic strength, it ...”

“... condemned to death for collaboration in Belgium. Simenon helped him to escape to Vietnam with the French Foreign Legion, where he was killed in 1947. There was plenty of conflict around. As with Letter to My Mother, in Dirty Snow the protagonist constantly puts himself in the presence of his antagonist without either of them making their quarrel explicit. In ...”

“... act and one which depends on gaining the right distance from the subject. His example comes from a French general’s account of a visit to the Pyramids and his anxiety about how to feel the emotional effect of their sheer magnitude. Too close and we see only stone by stone without taking in the full sweep from base to peak; too far away and we lose the ...”

“... War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under ...”

“... signifier, you will find explanations. Zapp gives a ludicrous lecture on the plaisir du texte. The French scholar Tardieu treats himself as a narrato-logical function. Somebody who doesn’t turn up (Zapp, actually: he has been kidnapped jogging in the woods at Bellagio) is said to be ‘the subject of a narrative function as yet unexplained’, and other ...”

“... its pile of wrecked German aircraft, compositionally modelled on a frozen sea by Caspar David Friedrich, was in fact discovered by the painter at the Morris car works at Cowley. Keiller pairs it with a French advertisement for the Morris 1100, an image of an economic future for British manufacturing that never ...”

“... that Cannes was originally described as a ‘state festival’; invitations were sent out by the French government and political delegations from different nations attended, much as they would a political summit. Until the mid-1970s, films were submitted by countries, and countries, rather than filmmakers, won the awards. Any country could object to films in ...”