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“... Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a ...”

“... warnings in his prose of a hidden part of him that was more real to him than much of what he did. Philip, his fictional alter ego in The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, Thomas’s only novel, believes as an adolescent that ‘there was something at the back of my mind, not quite hidden from myself and my schoolfellows – a weight, a darkness – which was against ...”

“... was how it would be done. Gaskell filled some pages about Brontë in Brussels by printing (in French) several of the pieces of work Brontë wrote for Héger. Then she made a more dangerous, more novelistic move, substituting the story of Branwell Brontë’s involvement with his employer Mrs Robinson for Charlotte’s parallel obsession with ...”

“... expert in structures and skins supported by their own tension. Another key mentor was the elegant French designer Jean Prouvé, with whom the peripatetic Piano studied in Paris. From his sculptural collaborations with Constantin Brancusi, through his furniture designs, to his modular schemes for colonial housing, Prouvé was adept at smooth combinations of ...”

“... pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that reference water: vast bodies of ...”

“... prevailed in our eastern dominions’, ran concurrently with his counter-revolutionary activism in French affairs. He was thought to be over the top on both issues. The latest volume of the Clarendon Press’s Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (which includes the nearest thing we have to a full-dress modern edition of the Reflections, somewhat ...”

“... Middle Ages England was a Continental power; during much of that time, our laws were written in French. Over half of Shakespeare’s plays are set on the Continent. Donizetti and Verdi certainly regarded English literature as part of their own heritage ... Our architecture is obviously part of European architecture, just as our literature and music arc of ...”

“... sent dozens of blokes to Mavis and they’ve all come back raving about her. She’s a genuine French polisher, the real McCoy. She gives the most bloody wonderful blow-job it’s possible to have. She’s an artist at it. So Mavis it is, and Dad – when next seen – is indeed gleamingly French-polished, and an ...”

“... own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they wished; and to elect a master and two wardens every ...”

“... Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly French history. He maintained his affection for India and visited it a few times in later years. It was an affection that was tempered by chilling memories of the religious violence he had witnessed at close quarters in 1946-47; hence the discomfort he felt in ...”

“... the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with ...”

“... Awkward Age (1899), which turns on the heroine’s violation of a similar taboo with an unnamed French novel. A book that didn’t get read is a rarity in these memoirs, however. And not just books, but pictures, periodicals, stage performances of every kind: all feed an appetite for representation that appears to have been every bit as eager – and to ...”

“... outnumbered Black attendees, and reacted indignantly to the UTN’s interpretation that ‘the French working class had allowed itself to be co-opted by imperialism.’ At a mass demonstration for Ethiopia in Trafalgar Square a few months later, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta approached the colonialism question more subtly. ‘You have ...”

“... after years as a regional correspondent in West Africa. I went to visit Emmanuel Lafont, a French Catholic priest who was one of the very few white people living in the vast black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of St Philip Neri, his parish church. The ...”

“... the foot, or the taste of a special flavour on the tongue. Imbued with the whole theatre of the French metaphysical tradition, Proust must have seen at once that this idea could not only be worked up into an impressive intellectual and imaginative thesis, but that it could also appear to be the key to an artistic unity, and a completed human drama. This ...”