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“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... Union, but her independent – and extreme – militancy caused a breach. In the words of David Mitchell, a biographer of Christabel Pankhurst, she became ‘an incorrigible freelance’. In the summer of 1913, newsreel cameras captured her running across the course of the most popular race of the year, the Epsom Derby, falling under a horse and lying ...”

“... anti-totalitarians, while many in France still admired the Soviet Union; in the late 1960s, French intellectuals became anti-totalitarian as younger Germans rediscovered the charms of Stalin and Mao (the Bonn government, meanwhile, was pursuing accommodation with the East via its Ostpolitik). It’s striking, too, that East European intellectuals have ...”

“... Trinity – was used first by Louis VI on his coinage, and gradually became associated with the French royal house. The representation of the kings as being especially favoured by God was furthered by the elaborate ritual performed when the holy relic of the crown of thorns was brought to Paris in August 1239, and the subsequent construction of the ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... title of Pictor philosophus, and at the beginning of the 20th he was co-opted into a trinity of French Classicists along with Corneille and Pascal. But on what uncharted seas was Poussin’s great mind voyaging? No one really had much idea until the publication of Anthony Blunt’s monograph in 1967, which argued that Poussin ‘thought in terms of ...”

“... a proletarian-chic Manhattan brasserie whose very name advertises its commitment to ‘authentic French working-man’s fare’ (steak and chips). From restaurant kitchens along the way come the shock-horror revelations (drugs, bugs and buggery, basically) that are the book’s biggest selling points and which, with the boost of a New Yorker amuse-bouche ...”

“... at all. His good fortune, he wrote in The View from Paris, his collection of essays on postwar French intellectuals, was to have entered on his professional life in the mid-1960s when Sartre was ceding the territory to Roland Barthes; when, as John put it, ‘the first rustlings of Literary Theory’ – he gave it capital letters – ‘were to be ...”

“... admires Rodney’s smoldering creativity, and although at a crucial moment he failed to stop the French fleet from taking command of Chesapeake Bay and thus doomed General Cornwallis to defeat at Yorktown, Rodney still possessed what another generation might call ‘the right stuff’. His fellow naval officers, either out of fear or lack of ...”

“... William of Orange was in personal command of the allied forces and was making headway against the French, but he had run out of cash to pay the siege workers. A delegation from the fledgling bank zoomed across the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first ...”

“... I’ve been having these bad dreams about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me ...”

“... Sometimes​ I’ve thought the whole idea of pleasure in Western art has been mortgaged by the French. Or maybe the Franco-Hispanic-Italo-Anglo-Dutch. It’s their artists, their subjects, their landscapes, their models, their faces. Their trees and their hills. Their beauty and beauties, their colour and light. In the current scene a few of the bad boys – long since turned grand old men – may be Germans (Kiefer, Richter, Baselitz), but, further back, isn’t there something displeasing about older German samplings? Something freakish, astringent, minoritarian, inturned? Say, Dürer, Dix, Liebermann and Nolde ...”

“... not nearly as good a critic as he evidently thinks he is. Compare his essay on Edward Thomas with David Bromwich’s in a recent Raritan, and you’ll see the academic critic is far better. In scholarship, on the rare occasions on which it arises, Grigson is irresponsible. In The Private Art he says that ‘years ago someone spotted that in another of ...”

“... to the distant time when I read a book a day. They begin with Lloyd George and the Generals by David Woodward,* a professor at Marshall University, which is somewhere in the New World. The difficult relations between Lloyd George, when prime minister, and the British generals from Haig onwards during the First World War have been a topic of long ...”