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“... from the fourth century, became models of the genre. Several medieval saints, among them Francis, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Becket and Catherine of Siena, have Lives that are both richly textured and historically grounded, miracles notwithstanding. Hildegard of Bingen’s hagiographers even included her memoir. Yet there are many saints about whom next to ...”

“... lesbian relationships as part of its dance of shifting sexual liaisons in the public rooms of a Paris hotel; Song at Twilight (1965) is about a writer confronted by his homosexual past. But Semi-Monde was not performed in Coward’s lifetime (and is published for the first time in Collected Plays: Six) and Song at Twilight was premiered in the dying days of ...”

“... bright synchronic leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John ...”

“... then and later (Lincoln Steffens, the Webbs, H.G. Wells, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, Bernard Shaw), but it was Ransome who first coined those glowing phrases that lingered in the Western mind for so long. He was thus a valuable commodity, as his great friend Karl Radek, the presiding genius of the Comintern, was quick to realise. To the mercurial ...”

“... to see what it could do. ‘By the time the war ended,’ Freud said, ‘I was longing to go to Paris. I went in 1946 when you were allowed to go … It just seemed amazingly exciting.’ While there, he had an affair with Michael Wishart, who was 18 – Freud was 23 – and a nephew of a woman Freud had been close to, and a cousin of the woman who would be ...”

“... buckled, and he wrote an open letter to – of all people – Rufus Isaacs, now involved in the Paris Peace Conference. Cecil’s death had brought to an end ‘the great Marconi duel’ they had been fighting, Chesterton began grandly. Isaacs’s actions in 1913 and his ‘type of politics’ had discredited the nation, Chesterton wrote, and he couldn’t ...”

“... Disco was much more and much better than all that.’ Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La ...”

“... A few years ago I was flying from Paris to Copenhagen on a day of calm and perfect weather. The flight took me over the sea beyond the coast of Holland, and looking down I was able to see in full detail the landscape below sea level, with its hills and valleys and – astonishingly – a lake: an accumulation of dark-blue water at the bottom of a valley, sharply separated from its lighter surroundings and maintained by some unknown physical process ...”

“... connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.Simone’s father, Bernard Weil, was a successful doctor. Her mother, Selma, had wanted to study medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it. Thoroughly assimilated French Jews, Simone’s parents practised no religion, and didn’t tell their children that they were Jewish until ...”

“... to allow his representative to check their authenticity. When the diaries were published in Paris and New York in 1959, a British official asked a diplomat at the Irish Embassy in London what the reaction in Ireland would be to the release of the diaries, adding that ‘in view of the present attitude in Britain to homosexuality, few people now in this ...”

“... trip for the tourist, the most fashionable spot for a second residence. London is now closer to Paris than Edinburgh by train; there are some 15 million visits by Britons to France every year, more than from any other country. The vicinity is lulling. Its effect is a countrywide equivalent of the snare against which every schoolchild struggling with French ...”

“... The Life of the Mind, when she had a heart attack walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to help, then was joined from New York by Lotte Köhler, Arendt’s longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Köhler were appointed joint executors after Arendt suffered a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The ...”

“... call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single ...”

“... and achieved some stature of their own: Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography (1980); Ruth Bernard Yeazell in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Howard Feinstein in Becoming William James (1984); Gerald Myers in William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Jane Maher in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry ...”

“... in the view that Eagleton is still a Cambridge man: in his essay ‘The Terry Eagleton Story’, Bernard Bergonzi pointed to the end of Literary Theory: An Introduction, with its expressed preference for ‘specific, living and practical democracy’ over the abstractions of the ballot box (‘specific’ and ‘living’, those Leavisite shibboleths), and ...”