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“... Globe on the Banck-side’. It was a court hit, too. If you wanted to say goodbye in style to a French ambassador in 1619, Pericles was your play of choice. Sir Gerrard Herbert described the opulent theatrical event ‘in the kings greate Chamber’ at Whitehall: ‘After two actes, the playeres ceased till the French all ...”

“... and three memoirs. In addition, he wrote 29 plays and translated three more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known’; and here too Maugham must have felt he was on the right track. He was the most highly paid writer of his day. During the 1950s he ...”

“... collection of essays, On Fashion (1994), Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris traced the change to French feminist theory, ‘whose stylish, wickedly witty, playful intellectualism made our heads spin’. Indeed, they argued, there was no escape from fashion, just as there was no escape from literary theory. Protest it how you will, fashion will consume and ...”

“... And the writing has such crooked vitality: the vernacular bumping against the spoilt, jaunty French, the slap of the phrases. What is most appealing is the quality of self-mockery. It is hard not to feel that Lawrence finds himself as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic ...”

“... In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes and design for an innovative production of Twelfth Night. Grant completed the commission, using fabrics from the Omega Workshop for the costumes, and went over to Paris the following February to attend rehearsals and install his work ...”

“... could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ventures in the scholarly ...”

“... Senghor had always wanted the two countries to have a federal relationship. Senegal sided with the French against the FLN in Algeria and opposed its bid for independence at the United Nations. And Senghor appointed French, not African, advisers to his new government. ‘We asked for the Africanisation of the top ...”

“... benign, even if at the administrative level there was a suspicion of Catholics. He was fluent in French – he wrote a biography of Voltaire – and was always keen to explore cultural difference, whether between east and west, France, England, Scotland or the Netherlands. He spent two years in Edinburgh studying medicine, and perhaps a year in ...”

“... a minefield, a desert. The world is dangerous, a place of mirages and mirrors and trompe-l’oeil effects, a place where we are easily disorientated and innocent-seeming things prove deadly: where to move at the wrong time is to go 90 degrees off-course, where a piano or grandfather clock may blow off fragile limbs. To survive in this unsafe ...”

“... into a craftsmanlike tradition running back from William Trevor and Alice Munro, via Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Dubliners, to the Russians translated by Constance Garnett. She has been admired since the beginning of her career for her restraint and the air of naturalness she gives her effects. It isn’t hard to imagine her tacking lines from ...”

“... the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture then called Figures in a French Café. Hill was striking early: the first Degas had entered a British collection only in 1872. It also made his holdings the largest in Europe at that time. In the year of its acquisition, Hill showed Figures in a ...”

“... any real plausibility, the splash of the cascade. The installation is called Etant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau/2. le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. the waterfall/2. the gas lamp). It is Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and was first seen in 1969, some eight months after his death. If you work from the body towards the title ...”

“... of Soviet satire. ‘A fine seat in the box and revolution on the stage. All I can say is: “Vive la république!” ’ say the double-chinned dinner-jacketed slobs in Karl Arnold’s caricature, while Toller, ignored by director and designer, stares out sadly from the photograph on the opposite page. Jürgen Schebera has already published a ...”

“... is not for delicate writing’, can occasionally irrupt with invincible common sense: ‘he puts Katherine Mansfield above Virginia Woolf, a “too well-educated woman writing her best” ’ – which at least provides food for thought; he thinks Galsworthy ‘a gentlemanly ass’; he asserts that copulation ‘has no connection with “passion” in the ...”

“... acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ...”