Search Results

“... the story of a Parisian rake in pursuit of an elusive scent (a vein mined far more rigorously in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume) alternates with a frankly embarrassing stream-of-consciousness monologue about a drugged rock musician living in mid-Seventies London. Neither of these adds much to Calvino’s glory: especially since, given their simultaneous ...”

“... And after my eyes have been beautiful, they’ll grow dim, as everyone else’s do. The French​ originals of these lines went out on Paris National Radio on 12 January 1957 in a broadcast of Le Square, adapted by Marguerite Duras from her novel of the same name. A stage version of this ruminative two-hander – a discussion of unhappiness between ...”

“... an unexpected surge by Mélenchon, are out of the picture). Zemmour is now a major actor on the French political scene. He is often described as ‘extrême droite’, but there are clear differences between him and the Le Pen family and their Rassemblement National (RN). For one thing, he is not a career politician. He has never run for election or had a ...”

“... all the seamarks and buoys. He would have to hold out of Calais as well as he could: at least the French were friendly, and they had begun sending him supplies. On the morning of Sunday, 7 August, Effingham’s council of war decided on breaking up the Spanish formation with fireships. By midnight they were ready, eight private ships packed with inflammable ...”

“... on the planet. Oh, how he rambles. But as with the aged drunken bores I used to listen to at the French Pub in the early 1960s, there are moments when the fog lifts and the slurred voice suddenly sharpens into knowledgeable passion, and you come back to paying attention, even if you know almost nothing about their subject. This happens in patches when ...”

“... to traipse around Europe, playing his fiddle, enjoying the seasons and the landscapes, learning French, Italian, German, Hebrew and, at Trinity College, Dublin, making a reasonable shot at modern Irish. He had the background of a gentleman and the instincts of an aesthete: spiritualism and theosophy were more in his line than the activities of the Land ...”

“... up and burst in the 1900s, and salaams have been performed in front of Richard Olney’s Simple French Food by some of the most precious amateurs in New York and London. (Oddly, when so many food books of little worth are published here – the unspeakable in pursuit of the edible – this frugally illustrated, decently produced book at a fair price has ...”

“... particular affinity for the story as a mode of expression. However, quite apart from the fact that French and Russian society can hardly be said to be ‘younger’ than English, his own selection of stories hardly seems to bear this out. In his anthology he includes one New Zealander (Katherine Mansfield), one Australian (...”

“... that is the minimal entry qualification for being considered ‘great’. In a memorialaddress, Patrick Blackett likened Florey’s achievement to that of Jenner, Pasteur and Lister: but the public were so little aware of him that when Macfarlane first approached publishers with the notion of a biography, they wondered if he would not do better to write on ...”

“... Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else.’ Later the same day, in a speech in Manchester, he had gone even further, proclaiming that ...”

“... about ending the Union and restoring Scottish independence? Did he lose his enthusiasm for the French Revolution after the Terror and the outbreak of war with Britain? Or did he merely keep his head down during Dundas’s counter-terror in the 1790s, writing for the drawer and staying secretly in touch with seditious comrades? Most recently, critics have ...”

“... to return to London, made himself its reconnaissance officer behind German lines. He and a band of French maquisards roamed the country for six weeks, marking German positions and losing several men in close combat. He got to Paris in October, making for the bar at the Ritz, where he was spotted by a ‘stunned’ Hemingway. ‘Christ, kid,’ Hemingway ...”

“... qualified by the need to exercise them responsibly or suffer the legal consequences. Even in the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) deployed the balance in remarkably sober terms: ‘The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print ...”

“... young, appearing in the oases, and the desert’). A happier influence on his work came from the French which was much spoken around him and whose poetry he discovered in the pages of the Mercure de France. When he left for Europe in 1912, he touched base in Florence, where he met the editors of the avant-garde though anti-Futurist magazine La Voce, then ...”

“... the public know what it had, was the Bibliothèque Nationale, the contents of whose Enfer, the French term for bibliothecal exile, are listed in its general catalogue. Only in the last decade, however, has the British Library distributed into its General Catalogue of Printed Books the entries for its own Enfer, known internally as ‘the Private ...”