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“... Whistler’s nerve, intellect and gravity; he fluttered about among the latest fashions. When the French painters fell in love with Japanese prints, Whistler fell in love with them too, and slapped Japanese motifs all over his paintings, as Sickert observed: ‘Japanese fans were arranged on English shelves, and English ladies . . . were popped into kimonos ...”

“... work going on in his adopted country. The interest in the figure allowed him to admire a few great French artists of the preceding century – Ingres, Manet, Gauguin – even if it kept him from a full understanding of their work. But it is also this special conception of picture-making that sustained one amazing blind-spot in Picasso’s sensibility at this ...”

“... history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took three seconds for the image to appear clearly, but it felt like an eternity. First, a bald head (which, at this stage, could have been mistaken for that of the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also bald), then the eyes and the ...”

“... blood in the line (as Gore Vidal has mischievously suggested)? Did the Bouviers come from the French nobility? The answer in all cases would seem to be no – just another generational leap from striving petit-bourgeois to finance capital – but an immense amount of worry about class and lineage appears to have gone on. Mr Davis has been through the ...”

“... among other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en ...”

“... same distance roughly as that between London and Edinburgh. Every MEP is issued with a standard French tin trunk in which he or she can pack his papers. But not everything can be transported, so all the larger pieces of equipment, computers, faxes, telephones, desks and so on, have to be supplied in duplicate. When the Parliament is in ...”

“... criticism of his presidency and turned a blind eye to his affairs with women as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, a 19-year-old White House intern and an East German spy). He also understood the power of television: both Truman and Eisenhower had appeared on the small screen, but Kennedy loved the camera and it loved him back. He was a politician who ...”

“... give him the slip. The unblushing bride was born in 1958. Her mother, also called Madonna, was a French-Canadian X-ray technician; her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was an engineer. The family was large but affluent, and Madonna grew up in pleasant suburbs: the blue-collar upbringing she claims for herself is one of her inventions, it ...”

“... novelist was uneducated. In his youth, he had been a good Latin scholar; later he taught himself French and Italian; when mathematics engaged his interest, he travelled once a week to Birmingham to study with a teacher there. Bage brought to novel-writing a well-stocked mind and wide-ranging curiosity. The novel – that ‘new species of writing’ – had ...”

“... in ‘jargon’ were first printed in the mid-16th century. But like German, Italian, English and French, Yiddish was both a spoken and a written language centuries before it ever appeared in modern published form. A prayer book from Worms composed in 1272 or 1273 contains what would appear to be the oldest dated work in the tradition: a single couplet ...”

“... In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang patriotic hymns. One of these, the ‘Marche Lorraine’, has a rousing chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne ...”

“... that the words ‘Death is nothing but eternal sleep’ should be posted at the gates of all French cemeteries, dropped too, but stayed in one piece. I could have applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for money to buy a couple of teacups and a new Robespierre, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Around the motel, residential and ...”

“... Americans, Dutch settlers and early colonists (which included, along with the English, ‘Germans, French Huguenots, Danes, Swedes, Belgians and Norwegians, as well as a significant number of African slaves’) contended with each other for the land. The American Revolution further traumatised the Hudson Valley, through both the battles fought there and the ...”

“... was a large board on the wall just inside the door for cuttings and postcards (mostly of Marilyn Monroe, sent by students to accompany the Eve Arnold photograph of her reading Ulysses that used to be on my door). The inner room contained philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, literary criticism and history, linguistics, classics, ...”

“... the breaking of wild horses serves as a metaphor for what has broken the quintessential female (Marilyn Monroe) and male (Clark Gable) – who ultimately set free the horses they have caught. It has been suggested that the ripper might be projecting onto horses the impulses that drove Jack the Ripper (or the Yorkshire Ripper) to rape women. But horses ...”