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“... It is unlikely that the governor of Lubianka gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over thirty years successive generations of BBC producers escorting guests through the labyrinthine corridors of Broadcasting House past doors bearing inscrutably coded designations have cheerfully informed them that they’re in the building that inspired George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ...”

“... The smugness, torpor and repression of British life that my generation of undergraduates hated were epitomised in Julian Slade’s long-running musical Salad Days, the story of a pair of inane Cambridge graduate newly-weds living in London with a magic piano. It opened in the summer of 1954, a few months before I went up to Oxford, and featured a jolly song supposedly counselling against nostalgia called ‘We Said We’d Never Look Back’, any three bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times ...”

“... Can you name the author who set you thinking? For Philip French, at a Bristol grammar school in the 1950s, the enlighteners were Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. For me, at a Wimbledon grammar school in the 1950s, Bertrand Russell filled the slot on his own, largely because his History of Western Philosophy was so long ...”

“... enfants, 1987 – the year of the story is 1944 – but it has echoes and relatives everywhere in French films since the war, and in French fiction of the same period. At the close of Malle’s (and Queneau’s) Zazie dans le métro (novel 1959, film 1960), the little girl who has breezed through all kinds of turbulence and ...”

“... first of what Tarantino calls his ‘chapters’, we meet Colonel Landa taunting an unfortunate French farmer who has hidden a Jewish family in his house. Landa knows the family is there, the farmer knows he knows, and the only real question is how long Landa can string out his ghastly impersonation of cordiality before he gets the farmer to admit that he ...”

“... and then dropped out, whereupon Embassy Pictures stepped in), Boorman was also helping a young French director, Arnaud Selignac, on an entirely different type of picture, Nemo, a fantasy being shot in a huge inflatable dome in Paris. As Philip French notes in a foreword to the diary, Boorman has made it his business ...”

“... not very obvious symbols of success. Is the man on the Lagos omnibus impressed by the Anglo-French nuclear forces or by the fact that the omnibus was made in Japan and his radio in Taiwan or Hong Kong? Nuclear weapons seem more like battleships in 1942, or cavalry regiments in 1916 – symbols of conservatism rather than of the ‘white heat’ of ...”

“... think of pseudy dudes in black 501s and Doc Martens, then I would prescribe a small daily dose of Philip Terry, for whom being experimental chiefly means being thoughtfully rebellious and funny. In his translation of Dante’s Inferno (2014), Terry is guided through the hell that is the University of Essex (where he is professor of creative writing) by the ...”

“... Shampoo, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Carrie, The Fury, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies ...”

“... In 1956 Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Uprising. At the same time the British and French tried and failed to capture the Suez Canal and to topple the Egyptian leader, Colonel Nasser. Thirty-three years later, the Soviet Union watched as one East European Communist government after another was swept from power by movements far more radical than anything conceived in Hungary in 1956 ...”

“... de guerre or the twilight war, an English journalist, with Labour sympathies, visited a number of French factories. He subsequently called on the minister responsible for industrial production, and posed the question of whether or not French workers were being obliged to work unjustifiably long hours. The minister ...”

“... Four hundred years ago, on 17 October 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died at the age of 31 of a wound sustained in a skirmish at Zutphen, where his forces had fought for the Dutch cause against Spanish domination of the Netherlands. It was one of the great deaths of English history. His early biographers – or hagiographers – wrought a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been ...”

“... It always comes as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there ...”

“... male) behaviour. But where baseball is all form, the Western is heavy on content. Essentially, as Philip French once observed, it is ‘America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past, however honestly or dishonestly’. As is the literary history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s ...”

“... the learned communications on specialised subjects. The presidential address even, which in a French institution of the kind would all too often become bogged down in somewhat empty generalities, remains, thanks to men like Carl Becker, a serious intellectual occasion. For which bravo, Messieurs les Américains. Of the second essay in the book, there is ...”