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“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”

“... the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under the joint tutelage of James and Conrad. The Good Soldier is often described as the finest French novel ever written in English, and it might also be thought of as the finest Conrad novel ever written in English. It is a book about betrayal, about the realisation that moral soundness allied to high tone and high colour is compatible with sexual and ...”

“... taste whether readers will like Glas. which Hartman calls ‘a scandalous literary pudding, a French trifle’. He admits there will be many who find Derrida’s style ‘exhibitionistic’ and ‘cheapened’. He does not claim that Derrida is unique, but acknowledges Derrida’s debt to the ‘heavier Heidegger’. Also, the use of puns and other ...”

“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... same time as classic. He is, of course, right to see Germany against the particular background of French Neo-Classical culture, since it was to French ‘rules’ that most 18th-century German literary attempts remained slavish. Paradoxically, then, German Classicism arose, abruptly, through a sturdy revolt against the ...”

“... since 1951, has many qualities, but humour is not one. The second and revised edition of The French Menu Cookbook contains the same catholic selection of recipes as the first, but has additional material in its very instructive introductory section on menu composition, wines and cooking techniques. Olney remarks, dismissively, that ‘the maniacal ...”

“... archaeology with Winckelmann’s repertoire of celebrated ancient sculptures. His account of the French Renaissance benefited from the pioneering work of his friend Emilia Pattison, whose Renaissance of Art in France – an example of the new discipline of art history – was published in 1879.This new Pater, cosmopolitan and engaged, is much more to our ...”

“... occupied by Tel Aviv hipsters and foreign tourists. The books they read are in English, sometimes French, possibly Japanese. The air is filled with a mixture of Dutch, Swedish, English and French, punctuated by loud bursts of Hebrew. For Israelis and non-Israelis alike, the objective is to get a tan. Everyone takes pictures ...”

“... of the hotel business. She had never been all that keen, bounced into it soon after her wedding by French parents-in-law with money-making ambitions. Her own mother was French, but her father, George, grew up in England; always someone prepared to live by a private idea, George made an unexpected return to London soon after ...”

“... and the dogs piss on it. Roland Penrose – a friend of the Bloomsbury Group, close friend of the French Surrealists and a Surrealist painter himself – was, as the blurb to this collection of his notebooks and letters claims, the ideal commentator on Picasso’s goings-on, a Saint-Simon at the court of Picasso. Penrose set off in 1922 on Roger Fry’s ...”

“... he would refer to him as ‘un con’.)On these and other occasions, the younger members of the French musical establishment wielded the Gymnopédies as a potent weapon against the Germanic solemnity and ponderousness they loathed; in the process, they lent these pieces a prominence they might otherwise never have attained. The rest is by now well-trodden ...”

“... a traveller, Harry Mathews’s Tlooth and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (both translated into French by Perec), Queneau’s Exercises in Style are striking examples of what may be achieved in the mode. Perec joined in 1967 as the group’s youngest member, but one of its most inventive. He excelled in composing bilingual poems, palindromes (his longest is ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”