“... Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots), he has recently been resurrected (in English, that is, since in French and German he hadn’t died) as the author of brilliant and bitter, if slightly too well-made fictions. It is from Joan Acocella’s fine introduction to one of them (Beware of Pity) that I take the fact that Zweig wrote a book called The World of ...”

“... in a new print at the BFI, was based on a German film called Fanfares of Love, first made in French in 1935 and then remade in 1951. Wilder, in 1959, was thinking mainly of the original, which he said was ‘deliriously bad’. Coming from him this was a compliment rather than a complaint, and he certainly found in the old work the basic premise of the ...”

“... of this reflex occurred some years ago. A remarkable discovery had been made of a complete French hand-painted pack of cards of about 1470. This was sold at auction in London to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. An article in the Illustrated London News described the auction; after discussing wardrobes, or some item of the kind, the author, turning ...”

“... protection to Princess Caroline of Monaco, swarmed about by paparazzi wherever she went; while the French courts were found to have given excessive protection, under Article 9 of the civil code, to news of Mitterrand’s cancer, a subject of legitimate public concern. None of this suggests either unworldliness or excessive interventionism on the part of the ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”

“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”

“... greeted the last major Wilson exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, curated by David Solkin, now of the Courtauld Institute, certainly the best, and probably the most respected, historian of 18th-century British art now practising. In the introduction to his excellent and, as it turned out, controversial catalogue, Solkin had suggested that ...”

“... a relaxed, multi-layered approach to questions of suzerainty and allegiance prevailed. A single, French-dominated ‘religious and knightly culture’ had spread across what were now southern Scotland and northern England. Stewart cites the striking example of Holme Cultram Abbey, a monastery of the French Cistercian ...”

“... nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a celebration of French peasant smallholding or the view from the Glacier Hotel. Effectiveness, in a work of art, is never to be measured in terms of honesty or accuracy or up-to-dateness – only by the power of the preserved fiction to put up-to-dateness back into the bruising ...”

“... and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s ...”

“... of this project had found their way into the enlightened declarations of the American and French revolutionaries. Baron Cosimo’s treatise would have found an enthusiastic reader in Shelley, but then he was always a marginal man. The one philosophe who might have understood it was Rousseau, who stands Janus-faced at the edge of the Enlightenment ...”

“... be abandoned’). The compilers have cast their nets wide, devoting over a hundred entries to French, German and Italian historians, and thirty more to Classical writers like Herodotus, Livy and Tacitus. But the bulk of biographical essays are about Anglo-American scholars. As a result, this book supplies something of a prosopography of the Transatlantic ...”

“... the story of an early lead, in this case literally lead, becoming a handicap. Already during the French Revolution Carnot had commissioned an inventor, Nicolas-Jacques Conté, to produce a native pencil, and Conté had responded in 1794 with what soon became the international pencil: the lead in it was made up of a mixture of water, graphite and clay, and ...”

“... said and not enough on the way of saying. A second might be that a European (and particularly French) sense of the mystique of language itself entered poetry in English through Modernism, and just as Modernism has thrived in America and been rejected in England, so does the language of the modern American poem tend to come to life of itself rather than ...”

“... other times I thought it was moving his way. Zhou En-lai’s famous remark about the impact of the French Revolution, that it was too early to tell, might be said of the impact of the Oslo Accord. Said called his most recent book The End of the Peace Process: that strikes me as premature. What was started at Oslo is still alive, if only just. The peace process ...”