“... but its appeal to racial authenticity troubled him: he thought of himself as a son of the French Revolution rather than as an African, and the struggles in the colonies as a sequel to the storming of the Bastille. ‘Je suis français’ were the first three words he learned to spell. After the fall of France in 1940, Admiral Georges Robert, high ...”

“... who all along decried the rumours of a rocket attack as ‘a mare’s nest’ (thus giving David Irving the title for a book) and said of Sir Stafford Cripps, who took the threat seriously: ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ Even when it was indubitably clear what was on the way, Cherwell fell back to arguing that the ...”

“... stopped at the port en route to West Africa: Bordeaux was one of the major anchorages along the French coast. Nantes dominated the business in African captives, but 346 slave trading expeditions left Bordeaux in the 18th century, the majority heading for the plantations of St Domingue. The shipowners, captains and traders were part of a large population ...”

“... microcephaly and other neurological disorders reported in Brazil, following a similar cluster in French Polynesia in 2014, constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.’ The statement by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, on 1 February was very precise. It wasn’t about the spread of Zika virus itself, but ...”

“... in his hands and pointed out to the right of the frame. He is wearing the uniform of a Zouave, a French infantry regiment famous for its élan and baggy red trousers; he now has a full beard, his gaze follows the line of the gun, and there’s a pipe clamped between his teeth. It is 1855, and Fenton has returned from the Crimea, where the war is still going ...”

“... into the collective named, variously, structuralism, post-structuralism or (stranger yet) ‘French Theory’, Deleuze is the least well known or understood in the English-speaking world. It is easy to ” see why this might be so, at least superficially. Although to some eyes his career and interests might appear to have been traditionally philosophical ...”

“... profile for the work entrusted to him, he cannot properly edit. One of Gaskell’s case-studies is David Copperfield. To establish the text of this novel, the well-intentioned editor must survey the number plans and MS (which, thanks to Forster, survive); the proofs which Dickens corrected for the first serialised-in-monthly-numbers issue, put out by Bradbury ...”

“... may say, of the obsession that one of his friends, Evert Dax, conceives for the splendidly built David Sparsholt, ‘I struggled slightly to understand it,’ but there’s no element of disapproval. Dax even asks why he’s so sympathetic, and he replies: ‘So much of that sort of thing went on at school it would seem very odd to me if it suddenly stopped ...”

“... to ‘Corioli’. Shakespeare, it appears, if the text was his, follows North’s translation of a French translation of Plutarch. One would have thought that his ‘small Latin’ would have sufficed to warn him. Here, surely, is a case where for everyone’s, including Shakespeare’s, advantage, it is wiser to follow the usual practice of ...”

“... of ‘the still small voice’. She writes of the latter (they resemble the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich) that they ‘brought the 19th century as close as it could come to silence and the void.’ Hopper, whose paintings are ‘silent’ in a similar way, wrote rather tetchily that ‘the loneliness thing is overdone. It formulates something you ...”

“... bombing of 1984; had Gore been president on 9/11 (in this last essay, written by the neo-con David Frum, any pretence to serious history is abandoned in favour of political propaganda masked as satire). No wonder Roberts refers approvingly to Kingsley Amis’s novel Russian Hide-and-Seek, which is set in a Soviet-occupied Britain. So what should the ...”

“... Smiley, modelled largely on Bingham, that le Carré owed his success.’ (To Bingham, moreover, David Cornwell owed his pen-name, via the French for ‘the square’.) The novelist Bingham liked plots, as might a man who was both a novelist and a runner of agents. He didn’t like the ‘fluffy stuff’ of ...”

“... tails by which the imagination catches hold on them while the sublime eagles and big birds of the French academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections – one of the very deepest sayings I have met with in Lord Bacon seems to me to be ‘There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’The strangeness of Palmer’s Shoreham ...”

“... David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment ...”