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“... for comparative thought – well, not real food, more of a light snack – in the fact that the French call roman policier what we would call a crime novel. A sign of our respective allegiances, perhaps, where our hearts are. Of course there don’t have to be police in a roman policier, just the sorts of activity the Police might or ought to be interested ...”

“... and repression, or the failure of these states, in turn, to preserve Italy from domination by the French and Spanish. Enough suggestive comments surface in the course of the dialogues to make clear that all the participants know these unpalatable truths. But they have no forum in which to confront them – only the hope, eloquently expressed but also hedged ...”

“... was known throughout the Western world, he was not admired everywhere as he was in Germany. The French set their face against him, repeatedly refusing to elect him to the Académie des sciences. In August 1878 they finally caved in, by which time it was too late for Darwin to be flattered, or even much interested. As George Bentham, a former president of ...”

“... held in 1996 to explore the implications of a seminal article published as long ago as 1974 by the French historian Jean Bérenger. Bérenger had argued that it was not a mere coincidence that all-powerful prime ministerial favourites – Richelieu, Olivares, Buckingham – emerged more or less simultaneously in the three West European countries which were ...”

“... school in Alexandria, and that seems to be about all the schooling he ever received. He had a French tutor when he was growing up, and presumably an English one too, since during the years he spent in England, between the ages of nine and 14, he not only learned the language but became familiar with its poetic tradition and wrote his first verses in ...”

“... of misquoting ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace’). The translations from the French are slovenly: in a dedication an English woman should not write and an English-speaking French woman would not write, ‘To my husband, who I would love even if he were not my husband’ – Who whom? Would ...”

“... Royal Air Force fighter pilot, OSS officer (in Yugoslavia with the Partisans), sapper in the French Resistance. Each was a lie. The ‘Duke’ was in fact a Jew from an affluent middle-class family: he had been kicked out of a series of decreasingly respectable prep schools (none of them Groton), flunked out of the University of Miami (not Yale, not even ...”

“... about his pursuit of a witch.Witekind’s account spread throughout Europe, reaching the reformer Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg, as well as his son-in-law, Caspar Peucer, who recorded the story in 1560. Peucer’s reference to werewolves as the enemies of witches then found its way into the work of the Italian bishop Simone Maioli, from where it was ...”

“... prefaced by a painting of a fish. Gould’s biography emerges in fits and starts. His father, a ‘French Jewish weaver’, died during his conception, and his Irish mother died during his birth. Brought up in an English poorhouse and educated by a paedophile priest, he claims to have had numerous adventures around the world – including an unlikely stint in ...”

“... of that final ‘clanking’? For all its richness, isn’t there poverty there as well, an almost French melancholy (Laforgue!) to the paragraph? ‘Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut,’ it says, more smartly and sassily, less mysteriously, in another story. Of course it was also, as Les Murray puts it, ‘the years ...”

“... Macmillan scrambled through the emergency exit, then went back into the burning plane to rescue a French flag lieutenant – a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of ...”

“... and made her watch while his wife performed oral sex on him – showing her how to do it ‘the French way’. (She told them she would never do ‘the mouth thing’, much to Carvelli’s annoyance.) They enrolled her in a brothel, where she was entered on Buenos Aires’s register of newly arrived prostitutes. By the time the couple decided to take her to ...”

“... pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual foundations of the republic, and renounces religion as undoing the ...”

“... submitted to the authority of the pope’. The gravitation of the unreformed Scottish Church to French Catholicism was equally unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of ...”

“... greedy and above all conformist to the highest degree.Much of Annihilation is concerned with French electoral politics, though Houellebecq has tried to avoid excessive topicality (and the rapid obsolescence bound in with it) by setting the book in the near future, in 2026-27. This attempt at future-proofing may have been reasonably effective when the ...”