“... formative influence on Nolan, as though he was reporting on a group encounter session: ‘The French would describe the relationship as a ménage à trois, although it was much less formal, having a freedom where all kinds of permissiveness were accepted as part of the total physical and intellectual experience.’ Nolan has made a career in the ...”

“... claimed that he had written Madame Bovary because he ‘hated Realism’. Nodding to a different French master, Maupassant notes that most of mankind’s ills come from ‘the dread of being alone’. And he himself shares that dread, which is why, even in nine days, he shuttles between afloat and ashore. He hates receiving letters, which ‘tie me ...”

“... Chaucer that chose a different path again. The leisurely capaciousness of a Gesamtkunstwerk like Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings’s recent Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, able to work its way through a mass of letters, reminiscences and anecdotes, is simply impossible without a great weight of material.3 Fiction is a separate decision. So one has to ...”

“... forgotten: Jean Baret, botanical assistant, was Jeanne Baret. Nor the sad tale of La Pérouse, the French answer to Cook, who set sail with ships that were ‘almost floating laboratories’ and vanished after leaving the newly arrived British colonists at Botany Bay. ‘Is there any news of La Pérouse?’ asked Louis XVI on the eve of his execution. The ...”

“... became involved in communist politics and labour agitation in 1920s New York. Gordon, fresh from Howard University, became part of the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular Front was founded, and ...”

“... recently, a very competent and balanced article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Howard Leithead. Naturally, Hutchinson’s readers are not expected to be interested in the Eltonian and post-Eltonian debates, rumbling on through a forest of monographs and crackling in the dense undergrowth of articles in the specialist journals. There is no ...”

“... Senghor had always wanted the two countries to have a federal relationship. Senegal sided with the French against the FLN in Algeria and opposed its bid for independence at the United Nations. And Senghor appointed French, not African, advisers to his new government. ‘We asked for the Africanisation of the top ...”

“... a queasiness that has to do with women: ‘He would feel afflicted by hand mirrors, of Celtic or French design, with sea-shell or gemstone-topped finials, ovular in their shapeliness; by broken morning rolls, soft silken purses; by hammocks swaying in the breeze, wash-basins, urinals, drains, sewers: these bothered him.’ Emilio, the youngest offspring and ...”

“... we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the lead), and we were very short of cash. I suspect that he was also being pressed by several creditors. What better way to deal with all these problems than to sublet the wing of the large house we were renting, and move to Yugoslavia for three ...”

“... may be at once their real-life selves and their imaginary roles. Early in the book we hear the French-master’s reminder: ‘Ils ne sont pas des vrais opéras, ces pièces de Lully, plutôt des masques ou des pièces de théâtre avec musique.’ A dozen pages later. Piers has pruned this: ‘the Lully operas are all pièces de théâtre avec ...”

“... on the original Brink’s Boston robbery, then the biggest cash haul in history ... We watched the French classic Rififi and saw ourselves drilling through the ceiling of Mappin and Webb’s Paris branch ... ’ It’s more than 30 years since the Great Train Robbery (it picked up the capital letters shortly after it ceased to be called, rather more ...”

“... is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous Faux Amis and Key Words, are happy to have Wittgenstein say, just like that, that the meaning of a word is its use. But Wittgenstein did not think the matter that simple. Burchfield prefers the more ample and flexible thought of ...”

“... of misquoting ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace’). The translations from the French are slovenly: in a dedication an English woman should not write and an English-speaking French woman would not write, ‘To my husband, who I would love even if he were not my husband’ – Who whom? Would should? ...”

“... floor or on the family pet. No Prince Charming ourselves, we will try not to think that we may be french-kissing a frog. ‘What will happen to social touching,’ asks Mr Rheingold, ‘when nobody knows where anybody else’s erogenous zones are located?’ Reading the personals on the electronic noticeboard (Blocked belletrist seeks triste belle, Oralist ...”

“... that usually ensued. When the abolitionist journalist and underground railroad activist Sydney Howard Gay interviewed fugitives who passed through his office in New York City in the 1850s he found that the threat of sale was a major reason for the decision to run away. Although most Americans today acknowledge the centrality of slavery to antebellum ...”