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“... assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in the case of Jacques Tati, have a ruthless control freak or incurable melancholic on his hands, although even his book contains one or two tales of debts unpaid, employees exploited and lapses into despair. (A very small price to pay ...”

“... Kadare dropped a few passages and added some new ones in a French edition of 1997, however, and David Bellos has changed the English text accordingly, as well as making ‘stylistic amendments here and there where they seemed called for’. (Bellos’s judgment in matters of style is not unerring. In Spring ...”

“... Life: A User’s Manual is an exception, though it has clearly taxed the ingenuity of David Bellos. A chapter of humorous visiting-cards, for example, produces only one instantly cross-cultural item (‘Madeleine Proust: “Souvenirs” ’ – not one of Perec’s subtlest efforts). Luckily there are occasions when a bon mot in French can be ...”

“... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells ...”

“... The only book about Albania I had read before this one was Edith Durham’s deadpan account of her travels there before the First World War. It is called In High Albania and describes how she had to become an honorary man in order to get around – not among the Muslims, as you might think, but among the Catholic tribes of the north, whose favourite Sunday pastime was shooting members of families with whom they were at blood feud ...”

“... rotating it you get an SS sign. Two X’s joined horizontally can be easily made into the Star of David. Bartlebooth’s defeat at the hands of the already dead Winckler is both poignant and uplifting; all the systems of life, from Nazism to the Olympics, must leak at the seams, and only through the encroachments of chaos does existence transcend the ...”

“... last years of Mrs Thatcher’s reign it was Perec, not Sollers, who – with the publication of David Bellos’s translation of Life: A User’s Manual – found a keen British audience. There were logics in these things, as we shall see. Perec’s reputation might easily have crossed the Channel two decades earlier. His first novel, Les Choses, was ...”

“... she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says that ‘everything is effable’ – but it does recognise mystery when it has to, and it once allowed us, Diski says, ‘a neat phrase’ for ‘the mist in our minds’: ‘I know not what.’ The phrase ‘works fine in ...”

“... tasteless plutocrat at a villa he built in Mallorca, where according to his English biographer, David Bellos, in Romain Gary: A Tall Story (2010), ‘he mostly ignored the people he invited, prowled around looking glum and subjected everyone to the various strange diets he took up to keep himself in shape.’ By the 1970s he was unalterably fixed as a ...”

“... of influence on the mathematical side. Queneau’s ‘Les Fondements de la littérature d’après David Hilbert’ treats Hilbert’s claim that instead of points, lines and planes you might just as easily say ‘tables, chairs and beermugs’ as an invitation to make a further move to ‘words, sentences and paragraphs’. Given that aspects of the Hilbert ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes ...”

“... in on Ronaldo’s blonde girlfriend in the crowd. What we didn’t know, but is revealed in Alex Bellos’s terrific book about Brazilian football culture, Futebol (Bloomsbury, 256 pp., £9.99, 6 May, 0 74755 403 x), is that he went on to marry a different blonde, Milene Domingues, who had the distinction of being the Brazilian champion at keeping a ball ...”

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from ...”