“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... accented German; perhaps in the former case the language barrier defeated Brahms (who had a little French) and Berlioz (who knew no German). In any event, the flavour of these extraordinary meetings continues to elude the most painstaking chronicler, as Macdonald most certainly is. It’s one thing to know that they happened, to map them in the mind’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unbreakable spirit to win! Fighting the Hun with pepper? Was that something that Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... eldest son, Bill, was dull; and of the other three boys, all of whom were highly intelligent, only David fulfilled his potential. Against his mother’s violent and continuing opposition her husband made him editor of the Astor-owned Observer, where he proved himself to be probably the best of all British post-Second World War editors. The other two, as well ...”