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“... The French prefer an allusive style in biography, with as little as possible of the scaffolding of scholarship showing. Jean Lacouture’s magisterial De Gaulle is virtually unfootnoted, has only a small bibliography and contains many verbatim conversations or remarks by De Gaulle that we have to take on trust, as well as many ironic thrusts and tight logical turns which can nearly knock you off your chair ...”

“... the introduction of the Listerian method.’ It was the same across Europe: Scottish, Danish and French as well as German hospitals became less dangerous. But carbolic was not safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much ...”

“... to the point of torturing and killing others. In 1971, the Stanford prison experiment, set up by Philip Zimbardo to study the interactions of students assigned the roles of prisoners and guards, had to be stopped after six days as the guards’ behaviour became more and more brutal and the prisoners became more and more vulnerable and traumatised. Given such ...”

“... travels through Greece with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, gluttonous and bibulous tours of French restaurants with his editor Jason Epstein, conversations with his Roman neighbour Italo Calvino, lunch with E.M. Forster, chat with Princess Margaret. But in Rome there were only months of reading, and Old Glory. Few people have identified themselves as ...”

“... connoisseurship to a marginal position. There was one great connoisseur in the National Gallery: Philip Pouncey, the most junior of the curators, who had been appointed by Clark himself. Pouncey recognised that the paintings were by Andrea Previtali, a minor artist who had been a pupil of Giovanni Bellini. Clark’s mistake would have been averted by some ...”

“... invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Nancy and Waldorf also regularly entertained Neville ...”

“... nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a ...”

“... during the War of 1812 Andrew Jackson called on Louisiana’s free Black militia – a legacy of French rule – to help defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson, who owned many slaves, issued an address condemning the exclusion of Blacks from the army as a ‘mistaken policy’ and praising the Black soldiers as ‘sons of freedom’.African ...”

“... disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on the centrality of the French avant-garde. Even as social and psychological readings were extended and deepened, the modern transformation of pictorial representation was credited to a celebrated line of painters from Courbet to Cézanne (with a few less well-known names like Mary ...”

“... our trees and houses, have longer histories than our country. My family home in Bouillon, on the French border, is decked with photographs of relatives who were born before Belgium was created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... in Ashbery, critics of poetry have been helpfully able to find that viciousness ready to hand in Philip Larkin’s verse, especially since his death in 1985. Ashbery’s first successful volume, Some Trees, came out in 1956; Larkin’s first fully achieved collection had appeared the year before. Nearly twenty years later, when High Windows was published in ...”

“... once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure.’ 17 February. Catch part of BBC2’s celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period; Les Enfants du Paradis, for instance, the first ...”

“... to abandon their Leninist-Maoist stance and to take up a rhetoric not far removed from that of the French New Right. Barthes maintained a certain canny ambivalence with regard to his radicalised colleagues and admirers. Derrida took issue more directly, arguing (in a well-known interview) that much of what passed for ‘materialist’ dialectic still bore the ...”

“... family is much older: a manuscript dated to the 1440s records it as a local tradition. In 1533 a French poet called Maurice Scève, a disciple of Petrarch, announced that he had discovered Laura’s tomb in Avignon. It was unmarked but allegedly contained a casket in which were found a handwritten sonnet in the style of Petrarch (albeit on an off-day) and a ...”