“... is narrated by a Paul Auster figure, a dedicated novelist called Peter Aaron whose c.v. includes a French apprenticeship, a novel called Luna, even (like his creator) a spell teaching at Princeton. He writes about Sachs, who has confided to him the secret of his final, fatal phase, from an admiring, quizzical standpoint not unlike that of Conrad’s Marlow ...”

“... piece. The Blessed Stanislas Kostka was commissioned in 1702 by the Jesuits in Rome from the French sculptor Pierre Legros to promote the veneration of a pious Polish novice. He is represented lying on his deathbed wearing a robe of black Belgian marble. His face, hands and pillows are of white Carrara marble, the mattress is yellow marble and the cover ...”

“... The demons were born of an unholy alliance between the nuns’ repression and certain twists in French politics. The exorcists got the nuns to confess whatever was needed, and in 1634 Grandier was tortured – the tortures are described by Johnson in casual, hairraising detail – and then burned. This priest is one of the central figures in Johnson’s ...”

“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”

“... part in installing it as the pre-eminent value of the West. Whether this is entirely fair to the French is a very moot point. Whether, in any event, it is cause for self-congratulation, as the author plainly assumes, is still more dubious; some readers might find the heartening scepticism of the Philosophes more appealing than the curious combination of ...”

“... turns out to be brief – brief and uneventful. All that happens is that we pass field guns and a French-built tank in the street. We pass jagged buildings and mounds of tandoori-coloured earth, staked with sticks to mark graves. Aid is being transported to Mogadishu by groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food ...”

“... government. This was not, then, a self-conscious, nation-building revolution like the American and French ones that followed. Again with reverberations in our time, the northern Netherlands was an asylum land, taking in many and diverse immigrants – among them, the rush of refugees who came north from Antwerp in the 1580s. It was tolerant, but the price for ...”

“... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...”

“... obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year after the outbreak of the French Revolution; they include Britain’s wars with France which lasted, almost without a break, from 1793 to 1815; they end just 12 years before the Great Reform Act. At no other time has Parliament experienced such a concentrated amalgam of trial, triumph and ...”

“... some of the blame for mankind’s ‘deliberate regression’. On he goes to the neo-classic (French, German and Danish versions). The thesis comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... seems to decide for the former. Kitty, after her final inane broadcast, passes her microphone to a French assistant who has been sneering at her, and who, though she has never broadcast before, is effortlessly eloquent and interesting when she does. Throughout Prêt-à-Porter Altman undermines or suppresses specific meanings or statements of intent. In an ...”

“... What if it’s not a philosophical question at all? It’s striking that Oë comes closest to his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did ...”

“... In constitutional terms, this is nothing if not innovative. General Nash and his British and French counterparts are charged with creating a stable security climate to allow the civilian authorities, under the guidance of the EU mediator Carl Bildt, to establish the new constitutional order in Bosnia. A literal interpretation of Dayton means that ...”