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“... in England by a visiting Frenchwoman, makes ripples in the plot of Evelina. She laments that the French translation of her latest book, The Wanderer, is, ‘I am told, ... really abominable’; Murasaki’s fear of misrepresentation by copyists has reduplicated in the modern world. She writes to her son, an undergraduate at Cambridge, who is in immediate ...”

“... it out.’ Meantime, however, ‘one groans with torture and horror.’ Not for nothing did the French troops say they’d make it, ‘pourvu que les civils tiennent’. At the time of these letters, Lawrence was best-known as the author of Sons and Lovers (an aspirant who, according to Henry James, might be seen ‘lagging in the dusty rear’ of Hugh ...”

“... evidence of a word. He probably got this one from the German; it doesn’t seem to show up in French until 1820. Soon autobiography was everywhere, and not in a good way. Or so it seemed to the editors of the Quarterly Review, who, as early as 1809, were fretting about ‘an epidemical rage for auto-biography’ infecting English writing. In previous ...”

“... acknowledge it or not, all contemporary feminists build on Beauvoir’s achievement. To face the French reception of her book, Beauvoir would need the courage of a bullfighter. The first volume was an unexpected success, selling 22,000 copies in the first week. But when the second volume appeared, with its detailed studies of female sexuality, Beauvoir was ...”

“... but it wasn’t established as a science until the Victorian era, when Scottish physicists drew on French research to improve the efficiency of the massive steam engines driving industrialisation. The word itself combines the Greek terms for heat and force, but its application now extends way beyond machinery to include biological processes, quantum mechanics ...”

“... Rilke she was to proclaim that, like all true poets, she wrote her own language, which was neither French, German nor Russian. Be that as it may, in her 1919 essay ‘O Germanii’ (‘On Germany’) she wrote that her passion for German literature and culture revealed two sides of her inmost being which could only be expressed in that language ...”

“... your reading for you,’ the publishers said. ‘His book will make you so well informed – you’ll never need to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable in company again.’ Of late, the uneducated, and even the educated, have been well served, for the familiar thick tomes of Hoyt, Benham, Bartlett, Stevenson, the Oxford (recently revised) and the Penguin have ...”

“... consider her one of the best Italian prose writers of the 20th century. Reading her in English and French, as I had to do, I found her style intensely belletristic, closely related to the classical grand style with its mellifluous periodic sentences and concatenations of scintillating images. She spins ornate webs of analogies, similes and metaphors, to the ...”

“... understanding of the family of flight’ by revealing that Orville didn’t talk to his sister, Katherine, for the last three years of her life. This is, Mackersey writes, an episode over which history has ‘drawn a kindly veil’. It’s unclear what benefit derives from having it lifted. The Wright Brothers, treated with such conscientious reverence by ...”

“... obvious gaps in this plump epistolary corpus are letters to or from women, in whose company, as Katherine Duncan-Jones has convincingly argued, Sidney seems always to have been most happy, productive and at ease. There are no surviving exchanges with his wife, Frances, or with his sister, Mary, and no letters relating to his time at Wilton House in ...”

“... canon is what gets taught.’ And I have the sense that Sarraute is no longer widely taught in French departments in the US. (The situation may well be different in other countries, not least in France.) A highly unscientific poll among colleagues confirmed my hunch. Nobody had seen her name on doctoral students’ reading lists since the mid-1990s. Some ...”

“... birthplaces, the confining clutch of circumstance, but I can’t. So, take them as they are. Yiyun Li was born in 1973 in Beijing. In 1996, she left for the US. She studied medicine at the University of Iowa, took her Master’s in immunology, worked as a research scientist, then slipped or skipped sideways and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she ...”

“... ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university recently founded in Wittenberg, a small town built on a sandbank in middle ...”

“... of interwoven tales. She traces Chaucer’s poetic development by examining his sources – French, Italian and Latin – and discusses the places and spaces of his eventful life. Some appear on maps (Reims, Hainault, Genoa, Navarre, the Tower of London, Southwark, Westminster Abbey), while others are mental categories ...”

“... look the king in the face till he had revenged their friend; a year on, he launched an attack on French galleys, and was drowned. Two of the men closest to Henry had perished in a war that achieved very little in any permanent sense. Henry Guildford’s power lasted until 1532 when, tired of the Boleyns, he handed Henry his resignation from the post of ...”