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“... walls, as in a Wren City church, were juxtaposed with piers cased in timber at the base which then rose into arches without capitals in between – all most irregular. It took years to furnish St Agnes with the wealth of screens and fittings Scott wanted. All Hallows never got that far before funds ran dry. It is often said that the late Victorian ...”

“... murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where Eco’s plot turns on a secret copy of a lost book, Binet’s this time revolves around a lost cycle of paintings. Another obvious precursor ...”

“... of March 1917 only six U-boats had been sunk in 142 actions with destroyers. Meanwhile the losses rose to appalling figures: in 1916 2,327,000 tons; in 1917 6,236,000; of these 881,000 were in April alone, more than 60 per cent without warning. April 1917 was a terrible month by land as well as by sea, with the bloodiest fighting on the Western Front and the ...”

“... fought over territories of the past half-century. The war for Vietnam’s independence from France ended in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Then came the war with the US, which reached its height after the commitment of American ground troops in 1965 and ended in the capture of the South by Communist forces in 1975. Yet this postcolonial history, and the ...”

“... general and composed of independent units – one for each occupied country except France, which had two, one for de Gaulle’s Free French and another for those loyal to Giraud – each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the ...”

“... working-class Belfast on TV, in fact and fiction. But viewing the familiar mayhem at a seminar in France made me more conscious of the processes whereby a slice of life ends up as a critical category. Ireland is used to being processed abroad: whether in the memories of ‘exiles wandering over lands and seas’, or by IASAIL (the International Association ...”

“... 19 lb per person a year. In their view, the Lomé measures flout Gatt’s free-trade principles. France is in yet another special situation: its Caribbean islands remain full départements of metropolitan France within the European Union. Martinique and Guadeloupe’s bananas have no problems in the market; they’re ...”

“... heading for Ireland, lost in winter storms. For anyone who thought the naval wars against France were simply a matter of ships called La Révolution, Le Droit du Peuple and Ça Ira being seen off by Indefatigable, Impregnable and Implacable, this handbook to history comes as a timely corrective. The shipwrecks listed include the one in which Lord ...”

“... element’ whose German blood had been contaminated by centuries in Eastern Europe. Resentment rose in proportion to the size of this new population. In 1950 they accounted for 17 per cent of West Germany’s population and 24 per cent of East Germany’s. They were expected to move to rural areas where there was less war damage, and communities were split ...”

“... trying to say something to the executioner. As the last shot was fired, the terrible, savage cry rose again from the crowd. Mothers with babies rushed forward to look on the bodies at close range, and small boys ran from one to the other spitting upon the bodies. The crowd dispersed, men and women laughing and shouting at one another. Barbarous? Such events ...”

“... Bolivia, prepared a huge collection of specimens that he planned to transport via Buenos Aires to France, but he so impressed the native servant guarding the boxes with the value of their contents that the servant absconded with the lot. De Jussieu, Honigsbaum tells us, was so disheartened that he returned to Lima, where he practised medicine and consoled ...”

“... Fred Vargas is a woman. Said to be the sixth best-selling author in France, she is unusual there in being a female crime writer, in contrast with women’s dominance of the genre in Britain. Vargas also writes like a woman, if that implies an interest in character, feeling and motive, rather than ‘brutality and eroticism’ (Queneau’s description of the polar – a contraction of policier – a genre inspired by the Série noire’s postwar translations of American crime novels ...”

“... was told by his uncle that his father was a courageous man who died in a duel. By the 1960s, as he rose through the ranks of King Idris’s army, other stories were doing the rounds. We flash back to a brutal, impromptu interview with an NCO, who informs him that he was fathered by an Allied pilot, a Corsican brought down over the desert by the Germans in ...”

“... and about the same number of objects from Africa and Oceania, which he was among the first in France to acquire. At one point or another he possessed no fewer than 53 paintings and 180 drawings by Seurat alone.A secret agent in plain view, Fénéon led multiple lives in the 1880s and 1890s. He worked at the War Ministry (of all places), and quickly ...”

“... This poem for Auden lovingly re-creates for him places around Grigson’s summer home in France; and readers of Notes from an Odd Country (1970) will not be surprised. France releases in Grigson moods of gratified expansiveness which mysteriously evade him as soon as he re-crosses the Channel. It can only be at his ...”