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“... the evidence. On 13 November 2015, when terrorists massacred ninety people at the Bataclan in Paris, Captagon was immediately suspected. To Professor Jean-Pol Tassin, an addiction specialist at Inserm, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, the killers’ ‘empty expressions, their determination, their mechanical movements’ all ...”

“... were hopeful guesswork. Finally, they were never quite sure what their masters in London and Paris wanted from them. The politicians were desperately anxious not to be seen to be involved, and they also suspected that the Bolsheviks had broken their codes. Direct communication with their men ‘in the field’ amounted to mutters out of the corner of the ...”

“... recognises certain sharers of her aims: among literary critics, Wayne Booth; among philosophers, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell; among social scientists, Amartya Sen. Nussbaum explains her discovery of virtues eloquently, volubly, in the manner of a belated Victorian moralist. The reverse of a dry writer, she is fairly often deeply moved, and you come ...”

“... He is not a son of . . . He didn’t go to Sciences Po or a business school,’ the manager of a Paris cinema told me. ‘He’s not a technocrat. His schooling was the cinema.’ In Sélection officielle, Frémaux remembers suiting up (as is obligatory) as a young man to sit in the worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film ...”

“... or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative years, according to this biography, were haunted by ‘the dark counterpoint of constant, brooding ...”

“... the safety and therapeutic efficacy of medical procedures are carried out either on the poor, as Bernard Shaw implied in the uproariously funny preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, or upon prisoners, for as Voltaire records in his letters from England, the efficacy and safety of variolation against smallpox was carried out with the enthusiastic connivance of ...”

“... Scott Lucas is right to stress that before Suez there was Buraimi. During a Nato meeting in Paris in December 1956, Dulles, who had just emerged from his bout with cancer, engaged Dr Luns, the Dutch Foreign Minister, in an argument about ‘colonial’ issues, referring heatedly to ‘your aggression’ in Saudi Arabia. When Luns asked him what he was ...”

“... city anywhere in Europe: Hippolyte Taine pointed out that London was more than twice the size of Paris and equal to ten Lyons or 12 Marseilles. (Glasgow, it should be said, was even more dominant in Scotland than London was in England.) Professional soccer required not just a few large towns, but leagues able to draw regular large crowds in 20, 40 ...”

“... ambitions. She was named ‘class actress’ in a high school that produced Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Zero Mostel and Walter Matthau. But she was lopsided from scoliosis, and when she graduated during the Depression, considered herself fortunate to get work at the National New York Packing and Shipping Company. Men handled the boxes, while ...”

“... 27 years. This means that many departments have suffered a sharp drop in their number of seats – Paris has gone from 31 to 21 seats and the in-fighting in the capital is the fiercest of all, especially since Le Pen is standing here and is bound to be elected with at least one other FN candidate. The party bosses have priorities of their own. Thinking ahead ...”

“... Lanzmann and his new wife reassembled the family in Brioude, in the Auvergne. Paulette moved to Paris, married a Serbian-Jewish surrealist poet called Monny de Boully, and barely saw her children for several years. The Vichy government wasted little time in passing anti-semitic laws after the fall of France in June 1940. Secular, assimilated Jews of Eastern ...”

“... its own unresolved memory of empire. Nicholas Henderson, a former Ambassador to Warsaw, Bonn, Paris and Washington, begins by acknowledging in his turn the ‘mystification’ and ‘misrepresentation’ attaching to the role, but takes a different tack. His memoirs are a defence of the traditional role of the ambassador, as someone who mediates between ...”

“... Emilie Bardach did, and Robert Ferguson has found her diary (hitherto presumed to be lost) in a Paris library, and reprinted large chunks of it. It’s a good find, illuminating about both Bardach and Ibsen. The problem, however, is the way Ferguson applies this and other late Ibsen flirtations to the late Ibsen plays, and in particular to The Master ...”

“... on a motorbike: this was, he later said, ‘the act of a pioneer’. Still restless, he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julien, Matisse’s Cercle Russe – and the Moulin Rouge. He listened to Apollinaire, attended Gertrude Stein’s salon, shared a studio with Modigliani and became known – after the local gangsters – as ‘l’Apache qui ...”

“... were directly inspired by Debray’s early writing, and Debray himself returned in triumph to Paris, where he pursued a prolific literary career. Le Pouvoir Intellectuel en France was published two years ago and now reaches us as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France. The French title, with its Gallic abstraction, grandiose ...”