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“... histoire de transformation se cristallisaient des tas de choses.’ It sold remarkably well in France, though many suspected that this was another one-shot wonder whose sales were based on the comic novelty of the plot and a generous amount of sex and violence. But Darrieussecq went to the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the press took care to tell its ...”

“... but close to the shore in Filey Bay.In 1779 the War of Independence was in its fifth year. France, keen to exact revenge on Britain for the Seven Years’ War, had signed a treaty with the Thirteen Colonies, effectively declaring war on its old enemy. Spain, too, declared war on Britain, and hatched a plan with ...”

“... wrote her book in Paris with the help of her adoptive Polish parents: it was published in France in 1984 to an enthusiastic reception. The American translation which now appears is a slightly shortened version which unfortunately lacks the author’s original drawings but includes some seriously misleading historical notes. Someth May’s ...”

“... further away. They ‘rejoiced in the British constitution’, celebrated military victories over France and idealised the king as their champion against Catholic enemies. Economically, too, they became more and more closely tied to Britain while leaders of different colonies had more contact with London than with one another. When the First Continental ...”

“... all but finished, a bit-player on an international stage dominated by its old enemies, Britain and France. Henry Kamen’s ambition is to show that this historical picture is essentially false. According to him, Spain did not make the Spanish Empire, the Empire made Spain. Furthermore, it was not a single coherent organism dependent for its existence on ...”

“... France, it has often been said, is a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of Versailles ...”

“... of English national memory, as shown by reactions to the recent trauma of mad cow disease. When France decided to maintain a ban on British beef in 1998 after the EU had certified it safe for export, the response was so violent that the French agriculture minister Jean Glavany went on television to complain that ‘Britain has unleashed a torrent of ...”

“... Similarly, in a United States in which Idaho voters sent to Congress the egregious Republican Linda Cherno-with – a woman who holds every kooky belief that drives the militia movement – one may be appalled at the popular support for such people or happy that there are so few of them. The question that everyone wants answered is whether Fascism can ...”

“... record shops, at the cinema.’The year after he met Taupin, Elton got engaged to a woman called Linda Woodrow. This caused Long John Baldry, with whom Elton had toured, to explain to him in a Soho club that he was obviously gay. The engagement was broken off. When he was 21, Elton ‘suddenly seemed to be undergoing some kind of belated adolescence … I ...”

“... on with them through successive changes of habitat – moving to the United States in 1945, to France in 1955, to Switzerland in 1957 – until 1972.The second bunch of Maigret novels have a more relaxed and expansive feel than the first cluster. At times the landscape itself is sunnier. (This is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers ...”

“... a flourish: ‘Among the many groups of people who suffered at the hands of the Ancien Régime in France – the insane, the poor, sodomites, alchemists and blasphemers – the impotent have long been forgotten.’ With these words, Darmon carefully places himself in the tradition of the late Michel Foucault, his history of madness as well as his more ...”

“... disparagingly put it. Born in New Zealand, she spent all her time in London and Germany and France just getting by, struggling with lack of money and poor health, writing in beds and bedsits, out of suitcases and in overnight hotels and all the time imagining a kind of writing that didn’t yet exist. And where everyone else in the new modernist age had ...”

“... to acknowledge her contribution to the biographical material in the last four chapters.’ Linda Wagner-Martin’s 1988 biography* reveals typographically, to anyone who examines it closely, that many passages were rewritten at a late proof stage, presumably under duress. Earlier attempts to write about Plath were either soured by authorial complaints ...”

“... that day, the Jacobin Bertrand Barère delivered a typically long-winded and overheated speech to France’s National Convention on his favourite subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two ...”

“... look like the latest novel from Gallimard) is a sequence of ten short stories about the British in France; and given this theme, they turn, of necessity, on interpretation, often in the most down-to-earth sense of the word. ‘Experiment’ relates how the narrator’s Uncle Freddy got involved with the French Surrealists. It was a favourite story of his and ...”