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“... has slipped to the edges of cultural memory. The first comprehensive biography was written in French by Pierre Legouis and published in an edition of 500 copies in 1928. It appeared in English, abridged and lacking its rich footnotes, in 1965. Despite the enormous amount of critical commentary on the poems, a lot of it tedious and exasperating, no major ...”

“... Tucson. In 1933, when Merrill was seven, his parents hired as his governess a woman named Lilla Howard whom Jimmy came to love. She seemed to have exotic European origins and, though not French, was to be addressed as ‘Mademoiselle’. Merrill called her Zelly. She ‘gave him his first book of foreign postage ...”

“... the learned, though he wished to know the world and for the world to know him (he spoke excellent French but knew no grammar. The tutor liked him and let him away with it). He enjoyed drinking but had zero interest in sports, unless snowball fights may be counted (golf to him was as profitless as study). He spent his time writing poems, but at conversation he ...”

“... that got him the offer to come to Hollywood and make a picture for RKO. The Martian script was by Howard Koch, who would later work on Casablanca and The Letter, but everyone always knew that Welles’s contribution was central. He had advised Koch to employ the present tense and let the story unfold as a piece of live radio: it would leak out, a string of ...”

“... published in 1939, he had written: ‘Liberty comes to the world from English traditions, not from French theories.’ And in a series of lectures delivered in Toronto in 1952, he declared that the story of liberty was ‘the basic theme of English history’. Second, we discover that although Butterfield wrote a great deal in the later stages of his ...”

“... in a house across the pasture. Lisa Marie adored her Southern family; the fried chicken, grits and French fries that the Graceland chefs would make at any hour of the day; the stormy weather that seemed to reflect her father’s changing moods. In this telling, Elvis is gregarious, nocturnal, prone to volcanic rages and tender gestures. Lisa Marie is a tiny ...”

“... nothing parodic about the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter except her name. Emanating from the French branch of the Rothschild family, she was a jazz fan whose New York apartment served as un fastueux logement de dépannage for Charlie Parker, If he had met her earlier he might have lasted longer. With the possible exception of Clodia, none of the women I ...”

“... cult object of Christ’s blood. Among religious traditionalists, Norfolk had plans to remodel the Howard mausoleum church at Thetford, having already obtained the king’s consent to make this Cluniac priory into a college. Remarkably, Norfolk proposed to model the new Thetford College’s statutes on those that had recently been written for Stoke College in ...”

“... years later, with Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead concerns an idealistic young architect called Howard Roark, a strict Modernist (although Rand does not use the word) for whom any structurally unnecessary ornament anywhere on a building is, as Adolf Loos once had it, a crime. (People often say Roark was based on Frank Lloyd Wright, but there are no ...”

“... at Saint-Briac, and Berlin, where his father served as US Attorney. Kerry was the cosmopolitan, French-speaking child of high-hoping Americans, and he still gives the impression of being someone who has spent too many hours doing prep. At St Paul’s School in Concord (paid for by his great-aunt Clara Winthrop), Kerry was, as a trio of Boston Globe ...”

“... English streak, at once familial and cultural. Anyone inclined to dismiss After the Empire as a French tirade should reflect that nationalism is, if anything, understated by the author. Equally, neither writer can be convicted of anti-capitalism. Here Soros’s record speaks for itself, while Todd accepts the necessity of free enterprise and market forces ...”

“... check broke loose, electing three Conservative leaders in succession – Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But ...”

“... didn’t like homosexuals. ‘Their funny clothes and their peculiar smells and airs and scraps of French’ struck him as ‘an obscenity and a threat’. Having struggled to remain monogamous (and heterosexual) for almost 20 years, he noticed a change coming. When he saw Gore Vidal on TV in the early 1960s he thought him ‘personable and intelligent’ and ...”

“... zoned to separate it from industry, leisure areas and the central business district; Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), which proposed verdant, self-contained new towns to accommodate what would later be called ‘overspill’ from the metropolis; and the City Beautiful Movement, which seized American planners in the early 1900s with ...”

“... and Forster’s mother, but Bess quickly got jealous and forbade ‘Tom’ to go to any more ‘French lessons’ at the Forsters’, timed while Lily was out shopping. The following year, though, Forster notes, ‘Tom came at last – but says his name is Dudley.’ Further encounters follow: ‘Tom 4 in all’; ‘Lust + goodwill – is anything more ...”