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“... dynasty. And it was part of that sexual magnetism that Anne, having spent most of her life in French-speaking courts, in Brussels and Paris, was to all intents and purposes French. Lancelot de Carles wrote that ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ...”

“... for an armistice; de Gaulle had made his appeal from London; and the Royal Navy had destroyed the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir to prevent it falling into the hands of the Germans. Some of his friends urged Saint-Exupéry to join the Free French, but he would not. He had no opinion of Pétain and still less of the ...”

“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country ...”

“... homely, beautifully unassertive’. She pictures herself in one of the houses, sitting by the French windows with a cup of tea and ‘listening to a serial on the radio’ – though why not ‘reading a novel by Anita Brookner’? But, alas, Harriet is marked now, both by affluence and by dissatisfaction’. When, after painful experiences, she is ...”

“... a mild form of chauvinism – the tradition he presented was, he implied, morally superior to the French and Russian novelists revered by an earlier generation. Leavis strenuously singled out what Virginia Woolf had called ‘the few English novels written for grown-up people’. These novels originally consisted of Middlemarch (Virginia Woolf’s ...”

“... down another field, diagonally, this time accompanied by a blue tractor. This pairing of views in Patrick Keiller’s 2010 film Robinson in Ruins – glimpsed again as part of his current installation at Tate Britain (on display until 14 October) – is almost too typical to be true and must, among other things, be a joke at his own expense. Since the early ...”

“... climatic circumstances that gave English cathedrals their distinctive character, as compared with French. His photographs are generally good, if understandably conventional. Perhaps most interestingly, he makes a good and still largely unfashionable case for Victorian ‘restorers’, notably Sir George Gilbert Scott. It emerges that the villains were often ...”

“... Patrick Modiano’s fiction is intricately caught up in time, as he himself says. ‘The great, the inevitable subject of the novel, is always . . . time.’ And more interestingly, less portentously: ‘I had the mania of looking back, always that feeling of something lost, not like paradise, but certainly lost ...”

“... Patrick deWitt​ is the sort of writer you imagine checking his emails on an old desktop computer in the library. His five deceptively simple novels suggest pleasant, old-fashioned things. They hinge on traditional plot devices – misunderstandings, a letter delivered or undelivered, a chance meeting. There is no modern technology here ...”

“... they promptly moved a little way along the coast to Sydney Cove, site of the later city. The French had also landed, and to establish a national presence the little British community indulged in what displays of ‘pomp’ they could manage, including, it would appear, this play production. Meanwhile they almost starved, bickered, and spread deadly ...”

“... until the outbreak of war Louis has never set eyes on a Jew), anti-socialist, anti-French, anti-Protestant, anti-Brussels and anti-government. Their right-wing Flemish Nationalist sympathies are restrained only by Louis’s grandfather’s anxiety to protect his monopoly over the sale of school supplies to the local convents. After the defeat ...”

“... archness of style. Most of the dialogue sounds as if it has been literally translated from the French, which may of course be another of the author’s jokes. But even such near-terminal playfulness may be forgiven in an author who conducts his Three Musketeers-type narrative with such irrepressible high spirits. Like Kurzweil, Paul Micou (who has lived in ...”

“... to something, or finding a new public for it, or being a sort of cultural ‘fence’ – what the French call a passeur – but either way, in Eliot’s thieving metaphor, the point is not where the stuff comes from but where it goes. It is less a matter, as generally reported, of the thief’s brazenness, than of the stolen goods’ destination and direction ...”

“... planet will give up her last secrets,’ he boasts. According to Andrew Martin, Verne’s recent French critics have also aspired to an illusory omniscience as they pursued structuralist, Marxist, archetypal or hermeneutic readings of the Voyages. Martin’s own (not wholly effective) way of disclaiming omniscience is to fill up his text with riddles and ...”

“... progressivists, structuralists and deconstructionists. Reminding one of those early 20th-century French hard-liners who insisted on calling themselves Catholics sans epithète, Elton pleads for plain, unadorned history as he himself has practised it. As we learned from The Practice of History (1967), history for him is practice – doing, not theorising ...”