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“... the tedium of this mini-Holocaust. Craig Raine’s 1953 is a very free and ingenious version of Racine’s Andromaque. Raine transposes the play to the imaginary aftermath of a World War Two won by the Germans and their allies. Pyrrhus becomes Vittorio, the son of Mussolini, and Andromaque becomes Annette LeSkye, a haughty English aristocrat, whose young ...”

“... between power and imagination, they do not see these relationships in quite the same way. Jean-Marie Apostolidès has written a lucid and elegant, if somewhat superficial, essay on the politics of spectacle. His framework of analysis is Marxist in the Althusserian manner, and his chief concern is with the place of the arts in the ‘state ...”

“... I’m always quoting le coeur bat l’iambe – Jean-Louis Barrault on the metre of Racine. Blood recorded on an echocardiogram in synch with karaoke squid shapes on the screen, I hear now with a woman in white coat. Though not iambic, more fluttery trochee, the odd dochmaic, anapaest, I note the verse in my pounding heart at least’s not free ...”

“... the 17th century, la maison came into the possession of Marie Desmares, known as la Champmeslé, Jean Racine’s mistress and the most famous tragedienne of her day. Racine died in a house in the Rue Visconti immediately behind la Champmeslé’s garden and Balzac’s printing-press: a plaque near a dismal doorway ...”

“... contemporary debate, which itself was partly political, over the relative merits of Corneille and Racine. ‘Racine makes lovers out of his syllables so that nothing can separate them,’ wrote a contemporary critic. ‘Corneille joins his ideas together so forcibly that his phrases resemble so many Gordian knots that must ...”

“... he quickly regained his composure, and he soon returned to Paris. There he now counted Molière, Racine and Boileau among his friends. In 1664, still short of funds, he was attached to the household of the Duchesse d’Orléans and discharged dull duties in the Palais du Luxembourg without enthusiasm until she died in 1672. On the other hand, he had his ...”

“... The weightless characters who track about in Jean Echenoz’s novels are granted a sense now and again that that’s where they are, in someone else’s story, fulfilling burlesque routines not of their own devising. They’re not great thinkers, merely see-through functionaries of the plot. There’s a droll exchange marking one of these twinges of self-awareness in an early novel called Cherokee – named for the Forties song, not for the Native Americans as such – between the driver of a Deux-Chevaux and his captive passenger: ‘ “We could take you somewhere ...”

“... to the year, the month, if possible the day when it happened: as, ‘1538, 6 March. The printer Jean Morin is Jailed for Having Published the Anonymous Cymbalum Mundi,’ or ‘1925, November. At 56, André Gide publishes Les Faux-Monnayeurs, His First Novel.’ Then, by way of a temporal recap, at the end there is a second list, of for the most part ...”

“... contingencies of everyday life. A high style will purge itself of references to vulgar reality. Racine wrote within a vocabulary of two thousand words. Iris Murdoch cannot write about supermarket trolleys, traffic wardens or blocked drains. Beside McEwan, the altitude of Murdoch’s style is especially noticeable. The following passage from The Child in ...”

“... dominance, or would French culture have triumphed? Would Shakespeare have written more like Racine, or Racine more like Shakespeare? Or would both of them have been inconceivable in the forms in which we have them? The fortunes of the French language in Normandy and England offer very different answers, and Chaucer is ...”

“... is a passport to a wider world.At the prestigious Lycée Carnot, Memmi studied with the poet Jean Amrouche, a Berber Christian from Algeria, and the French philosopher Aimé Patri. In The Pillar of Salt, the teacher Professor Marrou, based on Amrouche, at first strikes Benillouche as ‘an image of salvation’, proof that ‘it was possible to be born ...”

“... from reading ‘bourgeois’ fiction. The most engaging of the biographemes to be found in Louis-Jean Calvet’s Life is an occasion in the late Seventies when Barthes played (badly, by all accounts, and on location in Leeds) the role of Thackeray in a French film about the Brontës; by that late stage this wasn’t the comical piece of literary miscasting ...”

“... as subordinate arts. In literature it is the other way round. We have never absorbed Goethe, Racine or Dante as others have absorbed Shakespeare. Indeed, not the least embarrassing feature of a visit to the Continent is the widespread familiarity there with an impressive range of English letters, and the expertise that the visitor is assumed to be able ...”

“... worker manipulating the robot on the shop floor, every salesman in his dark suit, every jean-clad punk on his motorcycle, and every dedicated Marxist, has read some chapters of The Tale of Genji (and of the Pillow Book of the same period). Many of the residents of one of the noisiest capital cities in the world, living under an often hazy, polluted ...”

“... I must tell you that I had not thought for a moment of saying anything at all in the presence of Jean [the servant] and that if that happened it was absolutely without my knowledge [à mon insu]. Let’s think no more and talk no more about it. The broken glass will merely be what it is in the temple – the symbol of an indissoluble union. Your father ...”