“... chieftains, brought to London to ratify a colonial treaty, were taken to a performance in 1710. David Garrick, reviving the play in the 1740s, played Macbeth in the modern red coat of a Georgian general, so that he looked quite like the Duke of Cumberland, known after his treatment of prisoners taken at Culloden as the Butcher of the Scots. The play only ...”

“... such as it was, was inherited and discreet. Mayerne’s family origins were Piedmontese and French, though he was born in the Protestant oasis of Geneva in the aftermath of the anti-Huguenot pogroms of 1572. He was educated at universities in Germany and France, and his first and second wives were both Dutch. His long career as a court doctor was spent ...”

“... 16th arrondissement and walked a block, he was charmed by the fen-like view down the rue Félicien-David. His piece appeared a day or so later in L’Intransigeant, by which time people were comparing the streets of the city, dotted with dinghies and skiffs, to the waterways of Venice, but Apollinaire was reminded of a visit to Dordrecht. He recalled a small ...”

“... by Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said and others, not to mention any of their French influences and inspirations. These were relatively early days in the Theory Wars, and Kermode was splitting his vote in a way that was both subtle and rare. He liked transgressions but rather wished that the avant-garde would wait and see if the main army ...”

“... for even partial success. John Ross was to look for a northwest passage through Baffin Bay; David Buchan was to head north past Spitsbergen, with luck into the open polar sea and out the Bering Strait into the Pacific. On 29 August, Ross entered Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island. If only he’d known it, he’d found the way into the northwest ...”

“... de danse’. This was partly a bid for glamour, but also an acknowledgment of a long-standing French influence on dance fashions – just at the moment the Charleston swept in from the US. Its wild popularity in Britain established the pattern for the rapid take-up in subsequent decades of the jive and the jitterbug. These fast and physical styles ...”

“... Place, and sometimes worked together on a single picture. During the Blitz they drank at the French pub in Soho, cycled out during air raids and climbed over ruins on bombsites. Sometimes they went to the home of Freud’s late grandfather, which was not yet the Freud Museum, and took turns to lie on the famous couch.The blackout was convenient for ...”

“... the reader should have had at the start about the biographer and her purposes. Wagner, a French-trained Polish sociologist, is not a ‘Baumanist’, and her sociological training in Paris didn’t expose her to his work. Bauman was ‘neither my guru nor my friend’, she writes. Arthur missed a trick here, since Wagner doesn’t mean, as an English ...”

“... in Bruges, were in Sicily. Antonello would also have seen avant-garde Flemish and Southern French painting in Naples, where he appears to have studied with Niccolò Antonio Colantonio, the city’s leading painter, sometime after 1445.Colantonio is known as a copyist of Van Eyck, so Antonello’s first encounter was probably one of these works. Other ...”

“... held for the best students – to Deerfield’s ‘resident writer’, a not very able poet called David Morton, who was so impressed that he sent them to Poetry magazine, which accepted two of them. The poems appeared in the November 1945 issue. Ashbery was distracted from noticing their publication by the fear he would be expelled for homosexuality, but he ...”

“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

“... but at least no one raps in it, though you get the sense that Ben Franklin might have tried – in French. However, there are two scenes that flare to life. The first comes during ‘Momma Look Sharp’, which is sung by a 15-year-old boy, slain by the British, who lies in the killing fields and who will not rise again after the victory. This song seems to ...”

“... a companion than a child, taking him on their European travels, where he offered advice in fluent French to famous painters – Meissonier, Bonnat, Carolus-Duran – and had an audience with the pope. At thirteen he began collecting antiquities for a projected museum. And at fifteen he died, felled by typhoid in Florence, in March 1884.In accordance with his ...”

“... first, they intervened in Buganda when a civil war broke out between three factions, followers of French (Catholic) and English (Protestant) missionaries, and Muslim supporters of Kabaka Muwanga, tipping the balance in favour of the English-aligned faction; then they drafted most of Buganda’s adult population into military service and set about subduing ...”

“... Once to be had in Leeds Market for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close ...”