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“... tribesmen bearing little relationship to the Red Indians of 19th-century fiction and folklore. The French settlers spoke of ‘the Savages’, not of Indians, and the tribesmen referred to the French as ‘Normans’ and the Jesuits as ‘Black Robes’. Nor did they employ the ceremonious speech and picturesque names of the ...”

“... gates of the Tower of London, and he realised that men are everywhere the same’ (in the original French, les hommes sont partout des hommes). This is indeed Yourcenar’s belief, one which reunites the present and the past, nor is there any sense that she would give les hommes a feminist inflection. Gender and historical distance are, she holds in her ...”

“... in 2013? With Welsh being the best-known chronicler of underclass addiction, and St Aubyn in his Patrick Melrose books documenting the ravages of the same habits in a more privileged milieu, there’s a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last ...”

“... held in 1996 to explore the implications of a seminal article published as long ago as 1974 by the French historian Jean Bérenger. Bérenger had argued that it was not a mere coincidence that all-powerful prime ministerial favourites – Richelieu, Olivares, Buckingham – emerged more or less simultaneously in the three West European countries which were ...”

“... was sometimes said, was always in the pub but never really of it. Much the same could be said of Patrick Hamilton, who was best known in his lifetime for his stage chillers Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1938), but is mostly remembered for the expert depictions of joyless interwar boozing in Hangover Square (1941) and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the ...”

“... of the first four volumes of the series covered earlier critics that fall within the scope of Patrick Parrinder’s study. Authors and Authority in turn is an expansion of a 1977 book that stopped with the beginning of the 20th century. Now nearly twice its original length, it comes all the way down to the Yale Deconstructionists, the American proponents ...”

“... Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. Patrick Thursfield was instantly ‘caught up by the sweep of the story’, and this English edition is the result. The first book, especially, reads like a discovery in the attic, with the strangeness natural to translation, and the careless misprints of a hasty ...”

“... in which 27 British ships of the line in two roughly parallel columns attacked 33 belonging to the French and their Spanish allies in a confused line to leeward, Keegan does not appear to add anything to what has already been said, nor does he clarify what is perhaps inevitably obscure. Like all other writers, he states that 18 enemy ships were taken, that ...”

“... Gallic opposite number. This is the reason for Kestner’s meeting with the brother of Jeanne, the French girl with whom, in the days before the massacre, he had been intoxicatingly in love. Jeanne’s brother, a Resistance fighter, had been absent from the village on the fatal day: now he is a successful politician whose career has risen, phoenix-like, from ...”

“... prose of a more elegant age; at times it has the air of a classic novel translated from the French. L’amour, in White’s hands, is the subject both of fervid description (as in some vintage piece of erotica) and of worldly and cynical epigrammatic reflection. ‘Love does not obey the laws of amiability,’ we are told, and ‘love is the least ...”

“... then died raggedly away, replaced by a tumult of weeping. W.C. Fields would be proud of her. Patrick O’Brian’s 13th story about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin – appropriately called The Thirteen-Gun Salute – is as entertaining as its predecessors. O’Brian is a master of the narrative of action, but he has sustained interest through this long ...”

“... accusations by giving refuge to a band of Cistercian monks who had been cut adrift by the French Revolution. A Trappist monastery was set up near the castle, but this alien and Papist establishment caused such outrage that the monks had eventually to be repatriated to France. Villages were removed to make way for ‘parks’ all over the country, but ...”

“... occasion of new sequences of paintings. He became a popular provider of book jackets (C.P Snow and Patrick White, for example), and of stage sets for ballet and opera. The Queen bought his pictures, and he was knighted and awarded the OM. Kenneth Clark wrote an introduction to a monograph on Nolan’s work, and Nolan went to Sweden to accept ...”

“... a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of ...”

“... patient, it holds out against every effort of good will. Nothing Joyce said about it is much help. Patrick Parrinder’s book is a fairly straightforward introduction to Joyce, based on two congenially related emphases. The first is that Joyce’s work as a whole, and Ulysses in particular, feature ‘a poetics of the body’. In a letter of 1921, Joyce told ...”