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“... Joseph became king of Naples in 1806. Renamed the Royal Africans and briefly commanded by Joseph Hugo, father of Victor, they fought Calabrian guerrillas before joining Napoleon’s campaigns in Germany and Russia. A strange and bitter journey, which took men from Africa to the Caribbean, to France, to Italy, and then to the retreat from Moscow in 1812, each ...”

“... two years before the rise of Emmanuel Macron, but it is difficult not to view it in light of the young president’s approach to governance: a large-scale exercise in consultation with the people – with grievances gathered and measured – is followed by a ‘Jupiterian’ phase as the president imposes the necessary remedies from on high. In ...”

“... decisions anyway. In a conversation with his neighbour on the Wilhelmstrasse, Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg in April 1888, he let out all his violent feelings: My old Master was aware of his dependence. He used to say, ‘Help me, you know how hen-pecked I am,’ and so we operated together. For that this one [Emperor Frederick William III] is too ...”

“... intelligence services regularly tell their leaders that the radicalisation of a tiny sliver of young Muslims … is a result of US foreign policy.’While the tone of much of the book is quite cool and aloof, there is an enthusiastic chapter called ‘The Art of Spying’. ‘I have been fascinated by espionage from a very ...”

“... in Wodehouse also fall into categories: virtuous chorus girls who marry ineffectual but well-born young men; drippy poetry-readers; sexually aggressive intellectuals who read Nietzsche; tomboys who like playing practical jokes; or aunts. They all dominate their fiancés or husbands, except the intellectuals, who end up with thuggish would-be dictators or ...”

“... 17th-century poem of the same title in which ‘Bishop King/Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme/His young wife, lost before her time.’ Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper ...”

“... the Party its opportunity. In the 1919 debate over the Weimar Constitution, the Social Democrat Hugo Sinzheimer put a motion of admirable simplicity: ‘The death sentence is abolished.’ But even sympathisers argued that discussion of the issue should be postponed until the pending revision of the Criminal Code – still pending when the Nazis came to ...”

“... sheltering from the rain, and am suddenly bitten by inwit. Eric Sams’s books on Schumann and Hugo Wolf are patently distinguished, and, to judge from the bibliography in his edition, only Anonymous has contributed more to the TLS. Perhaps I should have left those hounds in mid-stream; they dry themselves so wetly. But then I remember his point about the ...”

“... hermeneutic pace, Wall writes about it engagingly, but, compared, say, with the life of Balzac or Hugo or Rimbaud, there isn’t really much of a story here: a handful of friendships and love affairs; the first outbreak in 1844 of the epileptic fits that were to recur until his death; the various travels (notably to the Middle East with du Camp and later to ...”

“... substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young cows); statue, trolley and rails are in turn mounted on a platform bearing the inscription DUAL, followed by a bracket and two forms of an ancient Greek verb. When a carefully trained magpie activates an internal spring with its beak, the platform slowly ...”

“... Lawrence and Stella Benson were among her favourites; she didn’t like Shakespeare, Goethe or Hugo. The 18th-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber was to her mind the world’s greatest work of literature. Big subjects – theory, history, politics – didn’t interest her. The complexity of human relationships, an individual’s ...”

“... perhaps, for ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, a tale which became a play and then an opera, about a young soldier who fights a duel with the man who stole the girl he had chosen, and is killed. But it is not one of his greatest stories and can give the impression that Verga was merely a Daudet-like painter of authentic ‘scenes from Sicilian life’. This ...”

“... of always being cold.The burden of these illnesses is hard to overstate. At a time when even young children were expected to help support the family, the birth of a cretin could be a catastrophe. Through it all, there was the fear of what a birth might bring; the fear that it was their fault. This was an ancient evil, noted by Vitruvius and Pliny the ...”

“... a work, 12 Square Metres. That’s the size of the toilet. By secluding himself in this way, the young performance artist Zhang Huan has become visible far beyond China. Such is the paradox of withdrawal and self-advancement for its belated avant-garde, and more generally in the late Nineties, for the country’s cultural élite. In Beijing’s dilapidated ...”

“... whole united at the level of its middle classes by the shared outlook of its bourgeois families. Young Léon attended the Ecole Normale, studied law, and married a girl from a Jewish background who had converted to Catholicism: thus confirming the impulse towards integration and the affirmation of ‘Frenchness’ which would typify his career, though it was ...”