“... 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 ...”

“... the platform. At school I was in all the top sets with a West Brom fan, and sat next to him in French, geography, maths, music, science and English. It was in English that I remember being called out for not knowing anything about football. ‘What’s your favourite Premier League stadium name?’ he asked. ‘Anfield,’ I replied, which I stand ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... on to direct Night Must Fall, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Isadora, The Gambler, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Who’ll Stop the Rain?, Sweet Dreams and Everybody Wins. His work has influenced more than one generation of British film-makers, and what he did for the stage – Beckett, Pinter, Tom Murphy, Terence Rattigan – has changed the ...”

“... put up. It’s certainly an interesting legacy for an Olympic city. ‘Between 1919 and 1923,’ David Gilmour writes, ‘there were more than seven hundred political assassinations in Catalonia’; and Temma Kaplan documents in some detail a large number of bombings, strikes and executions. The bourgeois paradise was also the Anarchists’ headquarters, and ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”