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“... theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the pain. He was a Cheekie Chappie. He was a little man, who had taken on a ponderous, pompous, stuffed society, defied all its conventions, punctured its hypocrisies, incurred its ...”

“... its borders. Later that year, a pillar of Europe’s outer defences began to crumble when Libyans rose up against Gaddafi’s dictatorship. Italy and Libya had signed a bilateral agreement on migration in 2004 that allowed Italy to deport undocumented migrants back to Libya. Italy also paid for the construction of several detention centres in Libya, with the ...”

“... two women who are the subject of Ruth Butler’s new book – Hortense Fiquet (Paul Cézanne) and Rose Beuret (Auguste Rodin) – Doncieux was first the artist’s mistress and later his wife. Hiring a model cost a minimum of one franc an hour; painting the woman who already shared your bed was clearly the cheaper alternative. Though both Monet and Cézanne ...”

“... deportation, released after less than three years in prison. On a summer’s day in 1944, with France newly liberated, Henri Boleslawski, who during the Vichy years had worked as an official in the préfecture of Tulle forging identity documents for the Resistance and for the Allied airmen they were sheltering, put his daughter, Liliane, on his shoulders ...”

“... live with Alfred, who refused to enrol them at school. He took them to lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne instead, and to the opera. His second wife, a pianist and composer, enrolled Eric and his brother at the Conservatoire. According to one teacher Eric was ‘the laziest student’ in the place, ‘gifted but indolent’ – another called ...”

“... his three volumes of war memoirs, published in the 1950s, sometimes at critical junctures: as France faced defeat in Indochina, for example, or five years later, when he had emerged from his long hibernation to entrench himself as president of the Fifth Republic. By ‘myth’, Hazareesingh means a coherent story that binds listeners together and speaks ...”

“... the threshold of pure musical development. That threshold was crossed, it seems, in 17th-century France. We hear of cors de chasse in operas by Rossi and Cavalli, and in Lully’s incidental music to Molière’s comedy La Princesse d’Elide. Lully’s music has survived, and it’s possible to see from his ‘Air des Valets’ – helpfully reprinted in ...”

“... Favori de l’Impératrice. After the October Revolution, the parfumier Ernest Beaux relocated to France, met Coco Chanel and offered her an array of choices based on Le Bouquet Favori, from which she selected No. 5. Another parfumier, Auguste Michel, stayed in Russia, working for the TeZhe trust (an acronym for the unromantic State Trust of the Fat and Bone ...”

“... present: Kossuth (Hungary), Worcell (Poland), Ruge (Germany), Herzen (Russia) and Ledru-Rollin (France). Together they toasted ‘the alliance between America and the future federation of free European peoples’. The initiative was typical of Mazzini. It had no real consequences, except perhaps to embarrass Buchanan in Washington, since these guests were ...”

“... selfishness and of lust for power met their match.’ The crowd was going crazy, but FDR’s voice rose above the din to reach his conclusion: ‘I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.’ The applause washed over Roosevelt (according to the New York Times) in a series of ‘roars, which ...”

“... world,In youth to gather up your inward strength.Mary, on the other hand, was sent as a child to France, to ‘the court of folly and of frivolous joy’.There in eternal drunken gaietyShe never heard the sterner voice of truth,But dazzled by the glittering show of vice,Was carried on the flood that leads to ruin.The idle gift of beauty she enjoyed,She was ...”

“... reform and students of 19th-century matters, that the infant death-rate in Great Britain probably rose through Victoria’s reign to run at around 153/1000 during the 1890s for England and Wales and 129/1000 for Scotland (the present UK rate is around 12/1000). In the slum wards of the great cities and in mining villages these rates were almost ...”

“... lived for five years in St John’s Wood. She died of consumption in 1882 and Tissot went home to France to paint a series of biblical paintings which were much admired in the Salon. Waterhouse’s adolescent girls are healthier than Burne-Jones’s, but they would have to be, judging by how often their pale bodies are seen by or in dank forest pools; sunless ...”

“... own writing: some eighty books, as well as the many letters and journals in archives in France and at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught for many years. Derrida saved everything he wrote: he regarded every scrap as a ‘trace’, an almost sacred emblem of survival – and all writing, from poetry to post-its, had philosophical ...”

“... In her recent collection Stories, Theories and Things, Christine Brooke-Rose was casting around for a generic term under which to classify such diverse novels as Midnight’s Children, Terra Nostra and Dictionary of the Khazars, and came up with ‘palimpsest history’. What all of these books have in common is their interest in the recreation of a national history: a history which, in each case, has been erased or fragmented, subsumed beneath layers of interpretation, forgetting, writing and rewriting ...”