“... the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not varied – with a pathos so homely and total that it brings tears to the eyes. Beckett and Pinter have nothing on Patrick Hamilton at his best: in fact, beside him they seem ...”

“... where we left off: ah, those samba Brazilians, possessional Spaniards, disciplined Germans, elite French not considered French by many French, joyous Senegalese, inexhaustible South Koreans, tragic Dutch, hapless English, even more hapless Scots and inexplicably absent Italians. The ...”

“... he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...”

“... extraordinarily rendered into the North Circular Road hinterland, was the Deptford percussionist David Aylward. His strident hi-vis disguise, colour co-ordinated with the favours of the London Overground, had been made for a French hunter who wanted to stand out when the bullets were flying in some seasonal avian ...”

“... thinking reflected instead a deep hatred and suspicion of the Russians on the one hand and the French on the other. Adrian Fort, in his new biography, argues persuasively that ‘on European matters a paramount influence upon Nancy seemed to be an aversion to the French’ and to ‘Latins in general’. As for the idea ...”

“... from a loose identification with the Workers’ Party to becoming a behind-the-scenes adviser to David Trimble in his brave attempt to bring Unionism to the middle ground of power-sharing with a domesticated Sinn Féin. Bew is allegedly the originator of the pithy identification of Trimble’s desired power base as ‘the Prod in the garden centre’; the ...”

“... disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on the centrality of the French avant-garde. Even as social and psychological readings were extended and deepened, the modern transformation of pictorial representation was credited to a celebrated line of painters from Courbet to Cézanne (with a few less well-known names like Mary ...”

“... it seems, did Shakespeare, who never used the word ‘grotto’, not even after the arrival of the French hydraulic engineer and garden designer Salomon de Caus at the Jacobean court encouraged the fashion for fancifully ornamented damp underground chambers that had been sweeping Italy since the 1560s. While the Stuarts and the Russells were commissioning ...”

“... has given rise to endless attempts at definition, by foreign observers as well as Americans. The French film critic Serge Daney, who loved America’s cinema as much as he despised its imperialism, called it ‘the place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash into’. Octavio Paz, evoking the country’s immense ...”

“... do. But so also do a collection of people whom I’ve never seen before, and in such numbers that David Hyde Pierce, who is presenting it, is practically elbowed out of the way. These turn out to be the backers who, of course, have every reason to be pleased and indeed one of them duly adjusts my tie. I am then bundled out through a back door and across the ...”

“... in a 1973 issue of the journal Science, describes an experiment the American psychology professor David Rosenhan conducted with seven friends (three of them psychologists and one a psychiatrist), who presented themselves at the psychiatric emergency rooms of a range of state and poshly private hospitals and asylums. They had prepared themselves ...”

“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

“... in a position to arrange for the simultaneous publication of In the Days of the Comet in English, French, German, Italian and Dutch. But his reception in Russia, both Tsarist and Soviet, puts everything else in the shade: between 1901 and 1966 there were no fewer than seven different multi-volume ‘Collected Works’ published in Russian. In the interwar ...”