“... 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 ...”

“... series of events: George III’s deliverance from insanity in 1789, swiftly followed by the French Revolution; the long and intensely bitter European war; a pandemic of bovine Tory patriotism; and the union with Ireland in 1800. Pitt used these events to redefine the political centre around himself, and to make men like Charles look dangerously radical ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... a Lieutenant Bridgman in the Régiment de Clare, one of the Wild Geese mercenaries of the French Army, who was killed at the battle of Lauffeld in 1747. Housman admired the mercenary unstintingly. Their shoulders held the sky suspended;   They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; Whom God abandoned, these defended,   And saved the sum of things ...”

“... the Bon Marché was not an isolated enterprise but that it typified, not merely Paris stores, but French society as a whole. ‘Bourgeois culture in France was divided within itself, not so much between upper and lower bourgeoisie or the forces of progress and stagnation as between two sets of values and attitudes, one that drove it to create what the other ...”

“... Van Gogh and others in the mainstream Modernist tradition, but in order to salvage Menzel for his French-oriented vision of art history, Meier-Graefe had to make a rigorous distinction between the progressive artist of the early ‘private’ pictures such as Rear Courtyard and House (1844) or Balcony Room (1845) and the conventional public artist whose ...”

“... illustrates how unusual Cordell’s paintings were in going beyond the inhibition and deference to French and American art that mark much British work of the period. Only Francis Bacon shows the body disrupted and distorted as she does.Cordell’s work, and what one critic called her ‘legendary panache’, should have ensured her a place at the forefront of ...”

“... business,’ observed his diametrical opposite, Lloyd George. Volume One of the new biography by David Dilks uses the voluminous Chamberlain diaries and letters drawn upon by Feiling, but supplements them with a mass of public and private archives not available in 1944. It elaborates in a quarter of a million words themes dealt with by Feiling in fifty ...”

“... at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of Mexican identity through public art. This new identity would yoke an ...”

“... formative influence on Nolan, as though he was reporting on a group encounter session: ‘The French would describe the relationship as a ménage à trois, although it was much less formal, having a freedom where all kinds of permissiveness were accepted as part of the total physical and intellectual experience.’ Nolan has made a career in the ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... provided a framework for the making and showing of propaganda films. Roel vande Winkel and David Welch’s essay collection, Cinema and the Swastika, widens the picture much further. In the mid-1930s, the Nazis began covertly acquiring cinemas and cinema chains around the world, while at the same time expanding the international distribution of German ...”

“... find myself at every international conference where the participating countries are identified in French – Royaume Uni – sitting next to a little Portuguese) was coming to the end of his peroration. Not, really, that it makes the slightest difference to the conclusions of a meeting, what ministers say at it. Everything is decided, horse-traded off, by ...”