“... other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ...”

“... steep fines they had incurred when secondary sanctions were enforced. In 2014, for example, the French bank BNP Paribas had paid $8.9 billion to settle a case brought by the US government. It would take more than personal reassurances from the US secretary of state, John Kerry, to get them back. In addition, Levey, the former Treasury lawyer, played spoiler ...”

“... in the Mahabharata. Its variants are also cross-cultural. At the end of Robin and Marian, Robin (Sean Connery), on his death-bed, shoots an arrow and asks Little John (Nicol Williamson) to bury him and Marian (Audrey Hepburn) close together where it falls. This variant comes from an ancient Indian motif best known in our day from Kipling’s Kim, whose Lama ...”

“... about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz ...”

“... London, Rupert took Paris, his mother having found him a nice family with whom he could learn French. His host was ‘very Chirac, a bull of a man with dyed black hair and big murderer’s hands. I could imagine Madame’ – the man’s wife – ‘dropping her coat on the floor and walking obediently to the bedroom, nude on her heels, as Monsieur ...”

“... an account that William, by now a professor of philosophy at Harvard, had written of the work the French physician Janet had done with hysterics, Alice gave a memorable description in her diary of the ‘violent turns of hysteria’, as she rightly called them, which she had suffered in her late teens. ‘As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with ...”

“... possessed in his books and his reviews, the Olympian, Nabokovian grand view. I wished I was French or English. I hated the arguments. I always saw both sides and then could see above the whole thing, see how inevitable the mess had become, once that vast plain in the south of England, those huge fertile fields, began to produce a surplus and there was ...”

“... more vivid encounters with severance, whose cause I slowly came to recognise as ‘the war’. Sean Crampton had lost a leg (his prosthetic replacement, which was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge ...”

“... write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is accompanied by the dressmaker who has been ...”

“... Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ‘Harpie’ Hargan, the Derry football hero. The TV wasn’t there, we thought wistfully, to cover us, or the long-running story that had brought us back to Northern Ireland after thirty years: the Inquiry into the fatal shooting of 14 unarmed civil rights ...”

“... in a warehouse full of supplies but would much rather spend the night in your bed’. Sean from Maine said he had travelled to volunteer in Poland but had contracted Covid and was ‘looking for a lady to spend time with who has or has recently had Covid’. You could tell yourself that these men weren’t seeking to exploit Ukrainian women for ...”

“... turned up for the weekend; the guest list in the interwar years included George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, H.G. Wells, Mary Pickford, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin – even Gandhi. David’s prolonged exposure to celebrities in his childhood meant that they held no fear for him as an adult. Sometimes, when Nancy got unusually loud ...”

“... It was under the control of Galway County Council, but operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours, a French order whose mission is to nurse the sick and dying, and who began ministering in Ireland in the mid-19th century. The council made decisions about who entered the home and paid a ‘capitation’ rate for each resident, but the sisters themselves were ...”

“... Even though she blamed Gregory for the controversy over the Abbey Theatre’s rejection of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, calling her ‘an obstinate old woman’, she kept her resentments to a few correspondents, including Dorothy Pound: ‘Christ how she repeats herself now . . . she’ll tell you the same saga quite literally three times in ...”

“... men had been ‘playing on the freeway’? It also led him to create a convenient villain, a young French-Canadian airline steward called Gaëtan Dugas, who was already dead when Shilts began writing his book. Dugas was identified as ‘Patient Zero’, a man whose sexual rapaciousness allowed him to spread the virus through the United States, and whose sense ...”