“... published a translation of French fairy tales of the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of them by Charles Perrault, with others by Mme D’Aulnoy and Mme Leprince. The collection included ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Puss in Boots’. This was a change of direction for ...”

“... as a Zouave when the war began, was killed in one of the several futile battles fought in the hope of breaking the Paris siege. He was 28. Renoir was conscripted and sent to the Pyrenees, where he got dysentery and nearly died. Monet, who had done a tour in the army in the early 1860s, was called up, but absconded to England. Zola stayed in Paris (he ...”

“... a familiar face at the casino. Guillaume, meanwhile, was enrolled in the exclusive Collège Saint-Charles, where he did well, winning numerous prizes. Apollinaire probably picked up from Walt Whitman his habit of naming himself in his poems: ‘Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes’ (‘I said to myself Guillaume it is time that you ...”

“... from the Merit of that Title) has degraded himself to offer Freedoms to his poor Servant!’ ‘I hope I shall always know my place’ is Pamela’s dictum as a servant, but like Jane Eyre she also has an angry sense of the obligations of a ‘gentleman’ and a refusal to be much impressed by the fine ‘ladies’ she meets. (The truculence and resentment ...”

“... War structures and attitudes have continued to dominate the US foreign policy and security elites. Charles Tilly and others have written of the difficulty states have in ‘ratcheting down’ wartime institutions and especially wartime spending. In the 1990s, this failure on the part of the US to escape its Cold War legacy was a curse, ensuring unnecessarily ...”

“... to make the return trip if they do – crabbed obsessives just aren’t good company, which makes Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire a harder narrator to sell than the suavely sulphurous Humbert Humbert. The obvious answer to X.’s rhetorical question is that Jenn wanted a baby and therefore more space, and managed not to notice that there was no room in her ...”

“... name. Other reviews I’ve seen have been pretty much raves. ‘Whooooosssh! What a trip,’ says Charles Spencer at the Telegraph: ‘it is an absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate ...”

“... the increasingly restive crowd: shaking their pop-bead rosaries and warbling rude jests about Charles and Camilla and the tampon. The Reverend seemed unaware of the blaspheming Sisters – though, it’s true, might not have got the jokes even if he had been. A few overwrought misfits were now also shrieking and booing. Local screamers. Rev. Cecil sailed ...”

“... that the shower scene changed the movies for ever, as well as apparently preparing the way for Charles Manson and Ozzy Osborne, Skerry makes much of the nipple, the stabbing knife and the first flushing toilet bowl on screen, all of which Hitchcock managed to get past the Production Code people. Leigh, in Skerry’s interview and in the Bouzereau ...”

“... Art’s Sake’ endeared him to the upper-class connoisseur, wrote, apropos of a Barbizon painter, Charles-François Daubigny: ‘It is really too bad that he … should be satisfied with an impression and should neglect details to the extent that he does. His pictures are nothing more than rough drafts left in a very unfinished state.’ Thirty years ...”

“... and in hypertrophied verse urged the patriots ‘Like nightly watchers from a palace tower/In hope and faith and patience strong to wait/The beacons on the heights’. He returned in 1829 from a trip to Burgos, Madrid, Granada, Alicante and Valencia with a sense of ‘23 years of existence squandered away’, and desperate to bridge the gap between poetry ...”

“... pearl’. When Bertie got cold feet, Albert angrily told him he was duty-bound to propose. The hope was that marriage might finally correct the weakness the tutors had failed to deal with. Given this upbringing, the question was not whether Bertie would rebel, but how. Soon after his exciting trip to Paris, he and his 11-year-old brother Affie were caught ...”

“... smile which is a great charm.’ Even across the width of a fairway, the author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was already melting under the impact of A.J.B. Lord Vansittart, a junior at the Foreign Office when Balfour was foreign secretary, confessed that he found it ‘hopeless to avoid devotion’. The secret of Balfour’s charm was his ...”

“... He returned to Beijing in 1974, and worked in a factory. He wrote furiously, even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a ...”

“... was interviewed on CBS. ‘I don’t think we have any national interest here,’ he said. ‘I hope we don’t get involved … The Americans are out. As far as I’m concerned in Rwanda, that ought to be the end of it.’ Melvern sees Rwanda as ‘the defining scandal of the Clinton Presidency’. She describes with contempt Clinton’s playing to the ...”