“... he arrives, and he learns to his horror that his mother died in the workhouse. The narrator in David Plante’s The Foreigner is a peeping Tom – twice in the book he experiences orgasm while watching or listening to other people making love – and he tells his story in a detached, remote style which at moments has echoes of Bainbridge’s accomplished ...”

“... of the population. It is worth reflecting on this colossal figure, and on the fact that in France, not atypically in continental Europe, the working class never achieved the 50 per cent mark: the peasantry was simply too big and by the time it had begun to decline, the new middle class had begun to grow. Moreover, the European working classes were ...”

“... but at the start of the 19th century it was pretty much the rule – to the extent that France in 1850 legislated to forbid the publication of unsigned articles on philosophical, political and religious subjects. A new book by Eric Barendt, Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics (Hart, £25), traces the contemporaneous voluntary abandonment ...”

“... concentrating on fiction. He has spent most of his adult life outside the UK (in Poland, Italy, France, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand), which may explain why he has been called a contemporary Graham Greene, an epithet which does him few favours, since his prose has little in common with Greene’s and the moral issues that preoccupy him have nothing ...”

“... simple task appeared to be beyond many local officials. John Rickman, who, following the lead of France and the United States, had dreamed up the idea of a nationwide head count and persuaded Parliament to back it, described the enumerators as men ‘who answer plain questions with much sincerity, but to whom difficult questions cannot be propounded without ...”

“... are to be found in other national literatures as well, including those of Catholic France, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. There are also non-puritan tributaries feeding into streams of American and Scottish literature that can account for some of these features. Indeed, they seem almost archetypically transcultural. If the nightmares of a ...”

“... half-crust. (“That bread alone was worth the journey,” they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.)’ This provoked disdain and wrath on the Letters page, and a response from Angela in the shape of a postcard from Austin, Texas. On the front was a picture of a ...”

“... of farting in a space vehicle. Richard Olney, an American expert on food and wine who has lived in France 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 ...”

“... 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 taste than the caricatural aesthete. But it would be just to acknowledge that Pater believed in the fine ...”

“... him. By 1770 Germany still had little to set beside the flourishing literary traditions of France, Spain, England. Goethe’s work thus came as a fulfilment of the need – the conscious expectation, even – felt by a culture which lacked the essentials of literary tradition: native masterpieces and agreed criteria.’ Only in Germany is it possible ...”

“... only Rabelais, Flann O’Brien and Spike Milligan, but also – more surprisingly – the likes of David Nobbs, Ken Dodd and Les Dawson. (The middle part of the book consists of a kind of Flaubertian dictionary, a ‘Satie A-Z’, and it’s pleasing to note that of the two Leses on offer, Les Dawson has a much longer entry than Les Six.) Satie as a Gallic ...”

“... after last-minute doubts made her abandon her wedding; from her room, she writes letters to David, the married lover she left back in England. Their affair is undone by his self-indulgence, the egoism that allows him to whisk Edith into the wings when she threatens his comfortable life at home: ‘She knew that he was a man who could not deny himself ...”

“... Eufemiano Fuentes, the Madrid-based blood doctor who is the Victor Conte of this year’s Tour de France, has claimed that all he is doing is helping his clients perform to their true level in what remains the ultimate endurance-test: not to look after their blood under such circumstances would be irresponsible. Fuentes appears to possess some of Conte’s ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... of African heritage’. Their findings paved the way for the return of 26 objects held in France to the Republic of Benin. All, including three anthropomorphic figures of Dahomean kings, had been seized in the 1890s, after the royal family of Dahomey fled a French expeditionary advance. The journey of these African magi, 130 years later, from the ...”