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“... her scatterbrained promiscuity and her early life. The other story is about a neurologist called Philip Wild, a man of a certain age and an even more certain obesity. He writes in the first person of what he calls ‘the art of self-slaughter’, not suicide but a form of mental magic, in which he makes his unloved body disappear bit by bit, only to ...”

“... As the years ticked by England became more and more isolated diplomatically. A cold war with Philip II of Spain had turned by the 1580s into military intervention in the Low Countries and France, and war at sea. With her rival claim to the Tudor throne, Mary Queen of Scots made Elizabeth’s refusal either to marry or to name a successor the most ...”

“... examples, is the Gospel of St Mark, and it attends to many recent works on this subject, mostly in French or German. A tone of yearning sorrow is often present, but Kermode’s theory must be applied to his own work: this tone should be part of his novelistic technique. He has long been keeping abreast of the latest ideas from the Continent, and I have ...”

“... to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,’ a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe’s response: ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A French writer,’ she says, ‘a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to ...”

“... political debt that we all owe to a Greek heritage almost three thousand years old’, while the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, spoke of France as the daughter of Classical Greece and welcomed the modern country into the Community as a sister. Is it any wonder that the Greeks, having been placed on such an exalted pedestal, feel affronted by the ...”

“... Chaeronea, a town in Boeotia in central Greece, was the site of a showdown in 338 bc between Philip II of Macedon and a coalition led by Athens and Thebes, Boeotia’s biggest city. Philip won the day. Three years later, Thebes was sacked by Philip’s son Alexander, and under Roman ...”

“... been defined in terms of his own peculiar use of symbolism, the symbolism that Yeats got from the French poets, especially Mallarmé. In her essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ Barbara Everett has pointed out these French, echoes: the fact that, for example, ‘Sympathy in White ...”

“... as a pariah state rather than come to heel. So there was something to be said for the view of Philip Baker, a bright young Foreign Office official seconded to the commission (later, as Philip Noel-Baker, to win the Nobel Peace Prize), that ‘the PMC is the most enlightened and most progressive body the council has yet ...”

“... This book, French readers were told one month before its publication last January, ‘is already the intellectual event of 1980’. As if in answer, the first printing of 9,000 copies of the three-volume set, each containing 1,751 pages and weighing ten pounds, sold out within three weeks. At almost £50 per set, Civilisation Matérielle seems likely to prove the commercial event of 1980 ...”

“... and three memoirs. In addition, he wrote 29 plays and translated three more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known’; and here too Maugham must have felt he was on the right track. He was the most highly paid writer of his day. During the 1950s he ...”

“... a young woman in postwar America was suffocating, why not try Paris? Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French tells the story of three college girls – Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis – who did. Kaplan, who wrote about her own year abroad in the memoir French Lessons, takes the three, who didn’t meet, as ...”

“... Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his ...”

“... Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991), Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons: A Memoir (1993) and Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames (1997), a generation of American feminist university teachers use their own experience to shed light on literary, linguistic, artistic, professional, pedagogic and academic issues; and use ...”

“... drawn British publishers’ attention.) Al-Aswany was born in Cairo in 1957. He was educated at a French school and learned English at an early age. A graduate course in dentistry took him to Chicago for three years in the 1980s, where he also studied Spanish so that he could read his favourite South American novels in the original. He became politically ...”