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“... Brown’s version of trauma and domestic dysfunction sometimes has a pre-packaged feel to it. (As Karl French pointed out in relation to American Beauty, the term ‘dysfunctional family’ feels almost tautologous nowadays.) Driving the Heart insistently fingers parents as mad, ill, absent or damaging: the focus of resentment and rage. The household is ...”

“... People​ said things about Karl, but not often to his face. He might like the things or he might not, and that did not always depend on whether they were intended as compliments or the opposite. Personal remarks could be returned with interest, hot or cold. Whichever way, he remembered them with accuracy.I can think of two personal remarks about Karl, in his early years, which reached him and went down well ...”

“... hovering over a destroyed landscape. A few years ago, on a walk during a conference break, a French philosopher and I exchanged friendly regrets that we were not, as it were, culturally better prepared to do the promise of each other’s work more explicit justice in our own. He reported that American friends of his had been urging him to read Emerson ...”

“... An acid test for the degree of candour achieved in Scott biography is the treatment given to his French wife. Macrone is not outspoken, but he does permit himself a breath of discrimination here. ‘Her memory is adored by the rustic population, and the “gude Leddy Scott” is a name never mentioned but with humble affection and gratitude,’ Macrone ...”

“... as a wartime contract worker. Having passed the stringent medical administered by the Chinese and French authorities, he travelled to Hong Kong and then in several stages crossed to Europe. He was put to work in France, where for 19 months he laboured ten-hour days, moving in a tightly circumscribed circuit between his designated place of work and the camps ...”

“... Conrad’s Polish Background, edited and introduced by Zdzislaw Najder (to which I think Professor Karl is indebted for much of his Polish material); the minute and meticulous tracings of Conrad’s every movement by Norman Sherry, who not only told us when Conrad was in, say, Bangkok, but on which side of which streets he walked along; the more contentious ...”

“... to prevail – once Malcolm Cowley’s Portable selection had, with some assistance from the French, put Yoknapatawpha County on the literary map in 1946. From then on, an increasing number of readers discovered that this relatively obscure Mississippean had written not one but a whole series of awesome novels – ‘full of the land dug out of his skull ...”

“... been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of Conrad’s extant correspondence – close to 1500 letters – has not yet been made available.’ Since Professor Karl, who makes this statement, elsewhere speaks of 3500 ...”

“... for these differences is not hard to seek, given the dominance of the Annales school in post-war French historiography. For them, the aim was une histoire à part entière – embracing all human activity – as Lucien Febvre expressed it: the duty of the historian was to record ‘the total social fact’ – a phrase from Marcel Mauss which reflects the ...”

“... le Carré owed his success.’ (To Bingham, moreover, David Cornwell owed his pen-name, via the French for ‘the square’.) The novelist Bingham liked plots, as might a man who was both a novelist and a runner of agents. He didn’t like the ‘fluffy stuff’ of character-creation. Jago admires him and his works, while being willing to call him ...”

“... hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the celebration. Even his absence from the international scholarly meeting at the ...”

“... by a British writer, and that British and American enthusiasts alike have profoundly depended on French initiatives: but it is not impossible, it is even likely, that such contributions may come. Many opponents of deconstruction would admit that Roland Barthes, whose death occurred the other day, was highly talented, and they could well have been moved by ...”

“... in Gerrard Street. This was the best coffee I ever found. The shop was kept by two elderly French ladies, who also kept a French café next door. After about five years the two elderly ladies sold out to two rather casual young men who kept the name of Legrain and the No 5 coffee. This kept me going until the ...”

“... in a Radio 4 poll who they thought was the most important philosopher for today’s world replied Karl Marx – he was easily the winner, ahead of Hume, Plato, Karl Popper and others. Asked to comment, Eric Hobsbawm said he thought that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from ...”

“... February, exacting a further three thousand casualties (and conceding only five hundred). Further French victories followed at Montmirail and Chateau-Thierry, with more than five thousand allied casualties. At the Battle of Vauchamps on 14 February, seven thousand Prussians were killed or wounded. The consequence of a campaign which was only being carried on ...”