“... canon is what gets taught.’ And I have the sense that Sarraute is no longer widely taught in French departments in the US. (The situation may well be different in other countries, not least in France.) A highly unscientific poll among colleagues confirmed my hunch. Nobody had seen her name on doctoral students’ reading lists since the mid-1990s. Some ...”

“... the pursuit of knowledge. I was surprised to learn that in 1915 it was accepted wisdom that the French invented, while the Germans and British turned their inventions to profit: many of my contemporaries in the Cavendish had to go to America in order to find someone interested in turning their inventions to profit. I wonder what killed the British spirit of ...”

“... Fama​ is a fickle goddess. In the early decades of the 20th century the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work ...”

“... chance of survival lay in the impossibility of reading everything he’d written. But no other French poet has had such influence: unlike Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Hugo affected more or less every poet who came after him. He threw out so many novelties he could hardly keep up with himself. A reader of any of the new selections will not only discover a way ...”

“... already has, and what is more, pursuing the controversy over the possible threat of cycling to the French birth-rate, has looked at Dr Ludovic O’Follo-well’s Bicyclette et organes génitaux (1900) as well. So dedicated an amassing of information, however choice some of the titbits, could have made a dull book. In fact, there is seldom a dull page, because ...”

“... every spring semester and you can meet Jamesian brahmins or Jewish literati who pronounce the French in the menu like the French do, upper – no less than middle and prole – America is stridently anti-intellectual where it isn’t complacently middlebrow? And isn’t it precisely the exuberant vulgarity and shameless ...”

“... were also the Dronkes, the Steiners, the people who founded the chamber music society. There was Karl Popper. Mostly they were reduced to doing jobs nothing like as responsible as those they had left. Popper, at Canterbury, objected to teaching basic logic, but he and others, like Peter Munz who worked at the university, had an easier time of it than ...”

“... suggest that she was anything but subordinate or in thrall to them: ‘she was a close friend of Karl Pearson [and] Havelock Ellis, with whom she discussed, in person and in a vast correspondence, ideas on women’s sexual and spiritual needs and their position in a socialist state.’ It sounds very cerebral. Phyllis Grosskurth suggests something more ...”

“... isolationist. German scholarship was much admired and emulated in the 19th century, as were French art and literature and Italian music. But political theory: no thank you. Britain had no need of doctrine, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary; nor, since there appeared to be no problem of the state, a doctrine of the state. Those writers who were ...”

“... what Freud was like (not to mention what it felt like to be Freud). Two new biographies, one French and one American, ask if we should do more than try to prove the life right or wrong. Freud’s accusers need him to keep still as an authority figure, so as to deplore his tyrannies, and their plaintiveness has an air of resentment against his refusals to ...”

“... inmates east; Arendt was one of only a handful of prisoners to grab at the chance offered by the French surrender to walk away ‘with only a toothbrush’, to spend the rest of their lives with the knowledge of what had happened to those who had not. One irony of the merch quote is that taking ‘what comes’ is just what Arendt didn’t do. Friends saw ...”

“... name suggests that he might be the author of books on dynamic thinking: he was a 19th-century French philosopher. John Lancaster Spalding, with 52 entries, turns out to have been a 19th-century bishop of Peoria. Even some of the British names are none too familiar. Sir Arthur Helps, with 33 extracts from Essays Written in the intervals of Business, was ...”

“... illustrates how unusual Cordell’s paintings were in going beyond the inhibition and deference to French and American art that mark much British work of the period. Only Francis Bacon shows the body disrupted and distorted as she does.Cordell’s work, and what one critic called her ‘legendary panache’, should have ensured her a place at the forefront of ...”

“... him. On the night of Friday, 2 July, he was driven to Birtley, where Sam lived, by his friend Karl Ness. He tracked Sam and her boyfriend down to a friend’s house, where they had gone after a visit to the pub. He apparently crouched under the bay window and listened to them bad-mouthing him for some time. When the guests started leaving at 2.40 ...”

“... of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared in 1886, the year of Vyvyan’s birth. These were the years, as Karl Miller wrote in Doubles, when ‘a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature, declared itself.’ Thus Dr Jekyll could announce with full conviction: ‘This, too, was myself’ as he became ‘a stranger in my own ...”