“... of interwoven tales. She traces Chaucer’s poetic development by examining his sources – French, Italian and Latin – and discusses the places and spaces of his eventful life. Some appear on maps (Reims, Hainault, Genoa, Navarre, the Tower of London, Southwark, Westminster Abbey), while others are mental categories ...”

“... look the king in the face till he had revenged their friend; a year on, he launched an attack on French galleys, and was drowned. Two of the men closest to Henry had perished in a war that achieved very little in any permanent sense. Henry Guildford’s power lasted until 1532 when, tired of the Boleyns, he handed Henry his resignation from the post of ...”

“... Globe on the Banck-side’. It was a court hit, too. If you wanted to say goodbye in style to a French ambassador in 1619, Pericles was your play of choice. Sir Gerrard Herbert described the opulent theatrical event ‘in the kings greate Chamber’ at Whitehall: ‘After two actes, the playeres ceased till the French all ...”

“... and three memoirs. In addition, he wrote 29 plays and translated three more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known’; and here too Maugham must have felt he was on the right track. He was the most highly paid writer of his day. During the 1950s he ...”

“... collection of essays, On Fashion (1994), Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris traced the change to French feminist theory, ‘whose stylish, wickedly witty, playful intellectualism made our heads spin’. Indeed, they argued, there was no escape from fashion, just as there was no escape from literary theory. Protest it how you will, fashion will consume and ...”

“... And the writing has such crooked vitality: the vernacular bumping against the spoilt, jaunty French, the slap of the phrases. What is most appealing is the quality of self-mockery. It is hard not to feel that Lawrence finds himself as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic ...”

“... In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes and design for an innovative production of Twelfth Night. Grant completed the commission, using fabrics from the Omega Workshop for the costumes, and went over to Paris the following February to attend rehearsals and install his work ...”

“... John, off to France to be civilised. There, at Blois and Angers, Buckingham learned how to speak French, fence and ride: the skills of a courtier. On his return, he found a mentor in Sir James Graham, a gentleman of the privy chamber (and a former favourite himself). While away from court on progress, James stopped at Apethorpe in ...”

“... could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ventures in the scholarly ...”

“... Senghor had always wanted the two countries to have a federal relationship. Senegal sided with the French against the FLN in Algeria and opposed its bid for independence at the United Nations. And Senghor appointed French, not African, advisers to his new government. ‘We asked for the Africanisation of the top ...”

“... benign, even if at the administrative level there was a suspicion of Catholics. He was fluent in French – he wrote a biography of Voltaire – and was always keen to explore cultural difference, whether between east and west, France, England, Scotland or the Netherlands. He spent two years in Edinburgh studying medicine, and perhaps a year in ...”

“... out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are often awkward or unclear, although better and more recent versions exist. For instance, he quotes from her version of Ferragus, with its reference to a street on which there was no ...”

“... a minefield, a desert. The world is dangerous, a place of mirages and mirrors and trompe-l’oeil effects, a place where we are easily disorientated and innocent-seeming things prove deadly: where to move at the wrong time is to go 90 degrees off-course, where a piano or grandfather clock may blow off fragile limbs. To survive in this unsafe ...”

“... into a craftsmanlike tradition running back from William Trevor and Alice Munro, via Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Dubliners, to the Russians translated by Constance Garnett. She has been admired since the beginning of her career for her restraint and the air of naturalness she gives her effects. It isn’t hard to imagine her tacking lines from ...”

“... the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture then called Figures in a French Café. Hill was striking early: the first Degas had entered a British collection only in 1872. It also made his holdings the largest in Europe at that time. In the year of its acquisition, Hill showed Figures in a ...”