“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had come into fashion in the 16th century as translators tried to justify the vogue for French and Italian poetry, both of which regularly employed it. Although Chaucer used this form of rhyme across the Canterbury Tales, with pairings such as ‘gentillesse’/‘hoolynesse’ and ‘cloystre’/‘oystere’, it was only in the late 1500s that it ...”

“... 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 ...”