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“... wrote to Anthony Burgess in June 1988: ‘I hear you have been attacking me rather severely on a French television programme ... You have thought it relevant to attack me because of my age (I don’t see the point). You should have checked your facts. I happen to be 83 not 86 and I trust you will safely reach that age too.’ In 1978, Constantine Fitzgibbon ...”

“... a Fred Karno’s army, untrained, largely unarmed, and kitted out in the horizon-blue uniforms the French had mothballed twenty years earlier. Three weeks after he joined it, Stefan’s division was chaotically dissolved with an every-man-for-himself order. He spent the next two years as itinerantly as he had spent the previous war: in hiding, on the road, in ...”

“... Witt dreams of a life close to nature among the Melanesian islanders, while Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) holds the view that each man should look out for himself, had better make himself an island. And yet a sense of connection between these men comes across, in no small part because of the collectivity of voices, inner voices linking soldiers outwardly ...”

“... disguise, colour co-ordinated with the favours of the London Overground, had been made for a French hunter who wanted to stand out when the bullets were flying in some seasonal avian cull. Aylward was a veteran of pilgrim routes. He had completed the Camino de Santiago from St Jean Pied-de-Port, the full voie lactée, with a final push to Finisterre. (He ...”

“... and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of ‘trusted friends’. Foucault: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ ‘The mark of the writer is … nothing ...”

“... February. For much of last year the post in Gloucester Crescent was delivered by a delightful French girl, Stephanie Tunc; blonde and pretty, she was chatty, funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance she didn’t like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on ...”

“... his well-informed introduction, to place Deane in the company of such writer-critics as Yeats and Sean O’Faolain. Somewhere near his core, though, he was an Enlightenment rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After ...”

“... most important new acquaintance was the novelist Thomas Flanagan, who later wrote The Year of the French. ‘When I landed in California,’ Heaney says, ‘my head was still basically wired up to English Literature terminals … When I left, thanks mostly to Tom’s brilliantly sardonic Hibernocentric thinking, I was in the process of establishing new ...”

“... Macmillan scrambled through the emergency exit, then went back into the burning plane to rescue a French flag lieutenant – a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of ...”

“... other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ...”

“... in the Mahabharata. Its variants are also cross-cultural. At the end of Robin and Marian, Robin (Sean Connery), on his death-bed, shoots an arrow and asks Little John (Nicol Williamson) to bury him and Marian (Audrey Hepburn) close together where it falls. This variant comes from an ancient Indian motif best known in our day from Kipling’s Kim, whose Lama ...”

“... London, Rupert took Paris, his mother having found him a nice family with whom he could learn French. His host was ‘very Chirac, a bull of a man with dyed black hair and big murderer’s hands. I could imagine Madame’ – the man’s wife – ‘dropping her coat on the floor and walking obediently to the bedroom, nude on her heels, as Monsieur ...”

“... possessed in his books and his reviews, the Olympian, Nabokovian grand view. I wished I was French or English. I hated the arguments. I always saw both sides and then could see above the whole thing, see how inevitable the mess had become, once that vast plain in the south of England, those huge fertile fields, began to produce a surplus and there was ...”

“... an account that William, by now a professor of philosophy at Harvard, had written of the work the French physician Janet had done with hysterics, Alice gave a memorable description in her diary of the ‘violent turns of hysteria’, as she rightly called them, which she had suffered in her late teens. ‘As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with ...”