“... 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 ...”

“... evening.’ A trip to the Pyrenees in 1825 helped, particularly when she met Aurélien de Sèze, a young lawyer who was also on holiday there. She called him her ‘guardian angel’, mixing, as she so often would, ideas of romance and protection. A few months later her affections switched to a former tutor in natural history called Stéphane Ajasson, and an ...”

“... for her favours. It was visited and written about in the 19th century by Flaubert and by Hugo, and later by Segalen himself, in his first piece of real writing. He was found dead there two days after leaving for a day’s walking from the hotel where he was staying; but the question was, and is, dead from what? He had a deep cut above the ...”

“... Jeunes France and their sympathisers who set up the famous battle at the opening night of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani were, like their counterparts in Young England, more style than substance. The battle itself was a defence of the Romantic against the Classical theatre but it was as staged as the play, the participants ...”

“... Germans? Unlikely. In Latin America the only leader who seems to believe in continental unity is Hugo Chávez, which is to say someone whom most other people do not wish to unite with. Often Latin Americans give the impression that language is still the key, so if their own team goes out they would side with Spain or Portugal; a problem in the forthcoming ...”

“... the sudden propelling to stardom of these three old hands of the radical left, especially among young progressives. But to the extent that LFI looks to foreign models, it usually invokes the Five Star Movement in Italy, for its canny use of new media, or Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, for their radical hostility to neoliberal ...”

“... general, slices of his legendary life. Leo (Design for Living), Charles Condomine (Blithe Spirit), Hugo Latymer (A Song at Twilight) are all smooth, successful writers. Garry Essendine (Present Laughter), George Pepper (‘Red Peppers’ from Tonight at 8.30) and Elyot Chase, a man of no apparent metier in Private Lives who nonetheless manages a dance and a ...”

“... on Antwerp, where Braudel has wisely relied on the significant new research of a brilliant young Belgian historian, Hugo Soly), but the broad mastery is lacking. Very few Dutch works are cited, although the leading Dutch historians are among the best in Europe. How can the economy and society of the Golden Age be ...”

“... Delphine is a novel in letters, with a number of narrators, of whom the central one is Delphine, a young woman of an ardent and generous temperament, left widowed and wealthy at the age of 18. She is attracted to Léonce and he to her, despite their differences. He is a product of the aristocracy with severe ideas of honour deriving in part (or so we are to ...”

“... or in a place – is the problem. Like Crossing the Mangrove, it begins shortly after a death. A young Black man, Dieudonné, has just been acquitted of murdering a white Creole, Lorraine. He owes the victory to his lawyer’s speechifying: ‘The cruel békée mistress. The defenceless slave. The mistress humiliates and wields the whip. One day, the slave ...”

“... and received. For Isou, such comprehensibility was almost as outdated as the writings of Victor Hugo, the paintings of Delacroix or the music of Wagner: art should represent nothing other than the medium itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful ...”

“... insect replicating its structure, almost exactly, to produce a collection of tiny, near-identical young. Indeed, this is the marvel of nature, the characteristic that has, hitherto, been used to divide animate from inanimate forms. Modern biological thought has focused on four principal questions. What is the nature of the mechanism that enables the ...”

“... we learned that the elderly passenger had lived in Venezuela for a year. The driver chipped in: Hugo Chávez, he said, was his hero. The mood stayed light until talk turned to Beslan: the elderly man’s granddaughter was one of the school hostages; she survived the assault on the building but was injured and lost an eye. He said he didn’t blame the ...”

“... encountered Mao himself: shuffling, speaking with difficulty, supported by one of his ‘pretty young assistants’. The meeting with Mao may have represented a momentous ‘earthquake in the Cold War landscape’ as MacMillan claims, but it was hardly the ‘serious and frank exchange of views on Sino-US relations and world affairs’ that would be claimed ...”