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“... to secure the British Isles against threat of invasion? Such a threat – always and only from France – was real enough between 1793 and 1805, and was thought to be real again when the extraordinarily excitable Victorian public thrice whipped itself into a frenzy between 1846 and 1859. Numbers were made up from two sources, the Militia and the ...”

“... in the Panthéon. Streets and schools and stations are named after him in Martinique and mainland France. But he isn’t required reading in most French schools, and his plays are rarely staged. It’s tempting to agree with the literary scholar Mireille Rosello that the official commemoration was also a form of erasure.Césaire can seem to be caught between ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... as well. First in, he was also first out. Political bodies did not rest easy in Revolutionary France. (They are even now subject to successive burials as their fortunes grow, although their recent peregrinations have been better regulated and not since the Revolution has a body, once in, been ejected.) The problem is that greatness is not so easily gauged ...”

“... party-list seats). Neither group has anything like the electoral support of the far right in France, Austria, the Netherlands or even parts of Scandinavia. Certainly, the current government of Ukraine is not a fascist junta, and the far right did do hearteningly badly in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2014. But Svoboda still does well in ...”

“... to be modern Iraq’s second and by others its third most populous city, was originally awarded to France as part of Syria under the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement. François Georges-Picot, the French delegate at the secret negotiations that divided the Ottoman Empire into British, French and Russian satrapies, laid out ...”

“... rest of it look like very small beer when compared to the £344,000 that Tessa Jowell’s husband, David Mills, stands accused of receiving from Silvio Berlusconi in return for the well-spun evidence he gave in two corruption trials involving the Italian prime minister in the late 1990s. In February Mills was found guilty of corruption and given four and a ...”

“... A few years ago, a brilliant small book on detective fiction appeared in France called Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? It got talked about at the time for demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the scent ...”

“... The organisers are almost bashful about the exhibition Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-90, which runs at the National Gallery until 28 January. Impressionist pictures are guaranteed to draw a crowd. But the individual painters, the social context, optical science and technique have all, as they point out, been analysed in books ...”

“... the villages dirty and charging high prices’) ‘may well encode experiences touring in France with both Ezra and Wyndham’. Furthermore, the glimpse of six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver ‘may well transcribe a fear of betrayal by the others in the gamble of making it new – with the “open door” the birth-canal of the ...”

“... Young Pioneers. When Hitler came to power the family fled, after brief stops in Switzerland and France, to the Great Soviet Union the boys had heard so much about. Markus remained there for 11 years, becoming ‘Misha’ and acquiring fluent Russian during a Moscow adolescence. The Purges affected the family only indirectly, but in any case his father ...”

“... unscripted remarks and interviews; an occasion for energetic activity with partners besides France, Britain and Israel. If he wants to stand as the equal of Putin in diplomacy and his superior in the practice of self-government, he might use the moment, too, to reconsider the extraordinary secrecy of his own administration in matters affecting security ...”

“... though not exactly new: as early as 1213 Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides’ translator in southern France, pointed out that readers of the Mishneh Torah in Christian lands had been led astray by their ignorance of the Arabic and Islamic context of its vocabulary. But few have learned the Arabic necessary to investigate this claim. Stroumsa is one of the ...”

“... of the last bachelor journey Kafka and Brod took together, through Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, in the summer of 1911 (Brod became engaged to Else Taussig the following year). The material, in this case, is abundant: two journals, essays by Brod and the draft of a collaborative novel to be called Richard and Samuel. Zischler shows that cinema had ...”

“... and extraordinary writings to be translated into English. Perec has been a household name in France since the runaway success of his first and most popular novel, Les Choses (1965), which still sells twenty thousand copies a year. Les Choses describes, with a sociological exactitude justified in the novel’s concluding quotation from Marx, the ...”