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“... effectiveness of a new play is hardly related to ‘human nature’. Rattigan’s first hit, French without Tears, originally called Gone Away, was deservedly a great success in 1936, and this was largely due to the audience experiencing a mild titillation in the course of the laughs, which would only have been possible in the days of the Lord ...”

“... Howard Rheingold, in his recent Virtual Reality, explained the idea of ‘cybersex’: how someday we will be able to don sensor suits, plug into the telecommunications network and ‘reach out and touch someone’ in ways entirely unforeseen by Alexander Graham Bell. Speculating about the impact of such artificial erotic experience, Rheingold turned to an already up and-running technology – to ‘telephone sex’, the adult party lines where you pay to make conversation with a member of the preferred gender ...”

“... years ago against the counterfeit of women’s fascination and the seductions of their tongues. As Howard Bloch points out in his short and combative study Medieval Misogyny, the flesh was seen as feminine, set in opposition to soul or mind, and the spirit wears the body like a concealing garment; to adorn this fleshly raiment with yet more artifice and paint ...”

“... Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, but it was English surgeons who finally cut the French emperor down to size. After his death on St Helena in May 1821, an autopsy was hastily arranged in order to quash claims that he had died from neglect. Napoleon’s height was recorded as a diminutive 5’2”, although he was actually 5’6”. His vital ...”

“... In an essay on Avatar in the March issue of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, Slavoj Žižek wrote that, despite its superficial espousal of revolutionary action (by blue-skinned aliens rising up against earthling exploitation), the film was in fact entirely reactionary. In an interview in the following issue of Cahiers, Žižek cheerfully admitted that he had written his piece without actually seeing Avatar ...”

“... describes took place in London, with a brief postscript in Paris. The embassy of the title is the French Embassy, located at Salisbury Court between Fleet Street and the river. (A contemporary map places it on the north side of the court, but rather typically Bossy argues it was on the opposite side.) Various politicians, authors and malcontents play a ...”

“... Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England. James IV’s army was equipped with an impressive number of modern cannon cast in bronze and was accompanied by Continental experts in the latest techniques in warfare. The army and its cannon made short work of a number ...”

“... 1945, the Russians were closing in, but von Braun and his A-team had a plan. ‘We despise the French, we are mortally afraid of the Soviets, we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans,’ said one of the engineers. More than five hundred of them set off with 13 years’ worth of documentation, which they concealed down a ...”

“... Searching for Cioran, which discusses the intellectual development of the Romanian-born French essayist, makes clear that in the days before and after the First World War, such Nietzschean calls were eagerly listened to. In the 1930s celebrations of the will to power were commonplace. Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908) had inspired ...”

“... often let me in without a ticket once the first race was underway. Ancient names such as Lord Howard de Walden, exotic ones such as the Aga Khan, captured my imagination, which had previously been engrossed by Sir Reginald de Cobham, whose effigy, with its helm and Saracen’s head, scarred with venerable graffiti, lay in Lingfield parish church and whose ...”

“... roar of it enlivens your west-country dell, as a whisper of it mine. Reminded of Bougainville for Howard Erskine-Hill ‘The rest is not our business.’ Come the end or a good deal sooner rest is our only business. Up to and battering that a swarming intelligence names the names, the localities. Who is to say when shearing the boom and in a way we least ...”

“... of 10 June 1944, a company of the 2nd SS panzer division, ‘Das Reich’, entered the small French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, herded most of its population, swollen by refugees, into barns and garages, the women and children into the church, then killed them with firearms and grenades. The panzergrenadiers had been informed that Oradour was a hotbed of ...”

“... Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991), Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons: A Memoir (1993) and Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames (1997), a generation of American feminist university teachers use their own experience to shed light on literary, linguistic, artistic, professional, pedagogic and academic issues; and use ...”

“... genre is heroic’ – meaning ‘Westerns, thrillers, sophisticated comedies’. Discussing Howard Hawks Scarface, he was agog at Boris Karloff’s death: He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn’t get up; a rifle shot prostrates him. The camera follows the ball he’s thrown as it knocks down all the pins except One that keeps ...”

“... for South Lanark. Lord Vansittart is surely the only British diplomat to have written a play in French and seen it run for four months in Paris. Joe Orton and his friend got six months for defacing library books. Serendipity reveals, incidentally, that on page 322 the name of the spy Fuchs has been spelled as one would expect a compositor under notice to ...”