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“... millions can never be comprehended by a single person.’ They also typify the difference between English and French intellectual approaches. The very title of Robb’s Parisians announces that it is going to be based on people rather than thesis or theory; while its craftily alluring subtitle ‘An Adventure History of Paris’ seems to hint at Jules Verne ...”

“... of his peers. Partly it’s the distinction – far more rigidly observed in Germany than in the English-speaking world – between serious and popular (e and u in German parlance, Ernst and Unterhaltung), but there’s more to it than that.There is something touchingly wrong about Zweig. He had a trammelled life and preached freedom; he gave himself to ...”

“... that inequality means bad outcomes are being distributed across the social scale, making even rich English parents more vulnerable than poor Swedish ones. This sounds like a knock-down political argument: more equality would give rich people in unequal societies the kind of life chances that even poor people enjoy elsewhere. Who could object to that? It needs ...”

“... fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.As Richard Holmes’s 1974 biography showed with such intelligence and affection, Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an ...”

“... British voyage to the South Seas returned with a striking Ra’iātean called Mai (known to the English as ‘Omai’). Banks introduced him to London society, and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny ...”

“... Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. McGreevy flits in and out of the lives of ...”

“... Borges’ is mentioned in ‘Things’, one of Borges’s best poems.) Fanny and her sons spoke English at home; Fanny ran the household as though they were in England. Borges was deeply attached to his grandmother; her version of England was as influential as his mother’s account of the family’s former splendour. Fanny travelled to Europe with the ...”

“... and left to run wild in a nature reserve, the Oostvaardersplassen. And Milton Keynes? ‘The English new towns were an inspiration for us,’ van Hulten said, and he smiled at me kindly as though I were a long-lost relative. He was one of the architects of Flevoland, and one of its early inhabitants. He and his wife were among the first 400 settlers of ...”

“... of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. There are confirmed music fans who can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’). With a ...”

“... when Highsmith was living in rural Suffolk in order to be near an especially hot (and married) English girlfriend, the fictional Pat kills her lover’s husband with a handy Black & Decker electric drill. She holds it by the fiddly bit-end but somehow manages to clobber him, inelegantly yet definitively, with the big-ass handle-end.And what about those ...”

“... deprecate self is one thing, while to denigrate self is masochistic. Without self-deprecation much English literary and academic conversation would become difficult to carry on. ‘Pre-emptive’ comes closer to the mark: you say this sort of thing about yourself before anyone else can. But that’s public, and a recognised ‘act’. In 1978, Berlin wrote a ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... of a Cosmopolitan Culture, Turgenev used this authority – and his command of French, German and English, as well as some Italian and Spanish – to establish himself as the consummate cultural middleman, a human conveyor belt transporting in one direction (in his own translations or on his recommendation) Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Daudet, the ...”

“... no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous ...”

“... writes Ferdinand Mount. Who better to illustrate the claim? Few figures in the world of English letters possess such a combination of credentials. Author of a number of novels; columnist or leader-writer for half of the nation’s press, with a record of service from the Sketch to the Spectator; champion of family values; political counsellor at ...”