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“... registers and ordinances to personal travel accounts from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and France. Groebner begins with a trick played on a 15th-century Florentine woodworker: his friends, among them a city official with a record book and a priest, insisted so strongly that he was someone else that he finally agreed, only for his friends to return him ...”

“... an older man; André is the older man, an architect living in fear of losing his romantic prize. David is dying of cancer; Sophia is protecting a dead frog that has come back to life. Joanna is a corporate lawyer who has taken on an unscrupulous client to raise money for her ailing sister; Slimboy is a Nigerian YouTube star, fearful of his country’s ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”

“... and Conflict, edits papers given at the third Centre for Environmental Studies Conference in 1979, David Donnison reflects on his time as Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission in The Politics of Poverty, and Susanne MacGregor provides the best of the bunch with her brilliantly incisive analysis of The Politics of Poverty in the welfare state. It is ...”

“... Full recognition came late to Louise Bourgeois. Born in France in 1911, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moved to New York, where she worked first as a painter and then, after 1940, mainly as a sculptor and assembler of installations. The catalogue of the exhibition of her work at Tate Modern (until 20 January) consists mainly of handsomely illustrated, alphabetically arranged entries by a number of commentators ...”

“... Dibdin to compose patriotic songs about saucy, lovable and brave sailor lads. The essays in David Cannadine’s collection illustrate the many ways that Nelson-worship served the war effort. Kathleen Wilson observes that his wounded body became ‘the screen upon which all those who had fought . . . who had lost their limbs or senses or a loved one to ...”

“... me, that all the books and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of ...”

“... got properly started before it begins to show signs of not going on for ever. So when I read in David Plante’s Difficult Women (1979) that Sonia Orwell in her final years complained to him, ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life,’ it doesn’t seem to me necessarily to imply a particularly tragic or wasted life. At ...”

“... fellow travellers trundling in their carriages across Europe. The first section covers the tour to France and Italy which Katherine, then 29, made with her Irish neighbours and contemporaries, Lord and Lady Mount Cashell. Setting off in November 1801, they, like many other Britons, were taking advantage of the peace brought by the Treaty of Amiens to see for ...”

“... military glory of the French by victories so numerous’ that they had flattened the kingdom of France. What had happened to make the English such an effective force in the decades since their humiliating defeat at Bannockburn in 1314? The short answer is the Battle of Crécy in 1346. The slightly longer answer would include the English victory at ...”

“... performance. I was surprised but delighted to find that J.I.M. Stewart’s last novel, A Villa in France, was a good deal more than the rather off-beat comedy of manners which it initially promised to be. An Open Prison reads at first like a latecomer to the minor genre of the public-school story, with references both to Greyfriars and to Stalky which show ...”

“... David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of runs. In the tradition of General MacArthur, David Gower has announced his return. I hope he succeeds ...”

“... but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction. The first three books each provided a snapshot of a particular point in Patrick’s life: his miserable, abused childhood in Provence in Never Mind (1992); his miserable, heroin-addicted twenties in Bad ...”

“... a quarter-century after the Civil War ended, writes about the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer, part of France’s foul Gulag archipelago into which half a million soldiers and refugees from the defeated Republic were herded – Soler’s grandfather among them. The most memorable of these extracts or sketches are about time – the draining of one kind of ...”