“... of that stubborn contingency which resists the high-rationalist schemes of the inhuman French. Even so, quite what Pope, Kent and Shaftesbury are doing in a study of Gothic is a question worth raising. Davenport-Hines’s Goths are an oddly assorted bunch, including among others Goya, Piranesi, Fuseli, William ...”

“... his permanent secretary.’ This is a very significant statement, and one with which I agree. French governments appear able to handle these situations with less difficulty, partly because they have in their gift a wide range of public appointments to which they can move top officials without too much loss of face. Even President Mitterrand’s socialist ...”

“... from the reality of unemployment (‘In Different Worlds’) – or the futility of Anglo-French ‘non-intervention’ in Spain (‘Heah. I say, fair play!’ Eden remonstrates with Fascist bullies assaulting Democracy in the street: ‘You shouldn’t encourage the aggressor, you know. After all, my friend and I aren’t trying to help his ...”

“... out by professional prudes as well as by the bookshops and circulating libraries themselves. The French judge and criminologist Louis Proal published in 1900 a weighty treatise on Le Crime et le Suicide Passionels, which was almost immediately translated into English. Proal, by no means a crude or a philistine writer, was inclined to think, as so many ...”

“... would be interesting to know how many British university libraries shelve Beckett’s books under French, not Irish, literature. Traitors sell their nationality, whereas writers, if they are well-known, find themselves trading on their nationality whether they like it or not. Neither traitors nor imaginative writers can ever fully discard what we choose to ...”

“... patrician of next-century information capitalism, Gates has been talking to everyone, including David Letterman, about what the future – guided by Microsoft, its controlling partner – has in store. With his transformation into a Third Wave Pollyanna, Chairman Bill is sounding remarkably like Speaker Newt, and his new book The Road Ahead has much in ...”

“... people, ‘like a fish in water’ according to Mao’s famous dictum. Colonel Roger Trinquier, a French commander during the Battle of Algiers, argued that ‘the inhabitant in his home is the centre of the conflict ... Like it or not, the two camps are compelled to make him participate in the conflict; in a certain sense, he has become a combatant ...”

“... acquisitive and devotional.This isn’t a totally new style in academic speaking and writing; as David Lodge has famously shown, the performative style of showbiz and avant-garde theatre entered academic cultural life in the Eighties through the very conference circuit that Paglia claims to despise. Jane Gallop’s skirt made out of men’s ties, Terry ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... in local English and describes itself as Tok Pisin (‘Pisin’ is pronounced like the French piscine) even though linguists (including Hurford) call it a creole. But how are pidgins to be distinguished from creoles? Terminology in this area is applied rather haphazardly. One reliable constant is that the three terms ‘jargon’, ‘pidgin’ and ...”

“... of these scripts: closely printed pages without a single indentation or paragraph break. In ‘French as a Literary Medium’, Griffiths informs his audience that, if they could see his script, they would not see any indication of ‘my accent or other tricks of my voice’. Such tricks included mimicry, funny accents, whispered passages and sudden bursts ...”

“... with not just any knife, but the Holy Lance itself, kept as a relic in Nuremberg. Jean Poyet, a French manuscript painter, designed a book of hours around 1500 with diamond-shaped cutouts in the centre of almost every page, except for those that bore sacred images in precisely that space. Readers working their way through the book could watch ...”

“... says admiringly. Hundreds if not thousands of books came back across the Channel, of which (says David Dumville) maybe eleven can be identified. One of the books imported was an enormous Old Latin Bible from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. It has not survived, but served as a format-model for the great Codex Amiatinus written at the twin foundations of ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”