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“... caged garden warblers hop south-west while their free fellows are flying south-west across France and Spain, then hop south and south-east just when the free birds turn south and east over Gibraltar. Further caging and experimenting has shown how birds navigate by the stars. I’m glad to know these things, and glad that Fiennes relates them so ...”

“... did Chagall really belong ‘among the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image ...”

“... had to commit to the new environment and learn to inhabit it. Swaying like a blanched orchid at a Peter Tosh concert was not good enough. Painful reprimands from minorities, in the workplace, the faculty, the televised debate were the stuff of our re-education as Europeans. By the 1980s, in theory at least, minorities and majorities were on an equal ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... to ashes in a single five-minute conversation between the prime ministers of Britain and France’ at the Paris peace talks. The Middle East (or most of it) was parcelled out among the victorious powers – the ‘Great Loot’, as it was called at the time. Lawrence’s Arab friends thought he had betrayed them. He felt he had too. He never ...”

“... British polity. To celebrate the launching of the Institute of Contemporary British History, Peter Hennessy and Anthony Sheldon have edited an engaging collection of essays on post-war British governments, starting with Paul Addison on the wartime background to Attlee’s success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... in the evanescent Norse discovery of America than in their well-chronicled activities in France and historically decisive foundation of Normandy. All four may be described as coffee-table books, and all four sustain their publishers’ well-earned reputation for superb illustrations – though a symbolic reductio ad absurdum of modern techniques is ...”

“... In politics, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle explain for the benefit of their less worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation and deviousness ...”

“... rescued her from the unwelcome attentions of a soi-disant army captain, and eloped with her to France. On their return, Sheridan fought two duels on Eliza’s account; once married, the couple relied on Sheridan’s income as a theatre manager (he bought a controlling interest in the Drury Lane Theatre at the age of 25), and his earnings from the three ...”

“... the watering holes, brothels, law courts and jails of Paris, the Loire valley and other parts of France. In his early thirties he was charged with the murder of a priest in the course of a quarrel. He went into hiding and appealed to the courts for remission, which was granted. The following year – 1456 – there was a robbery at the theology faculty of ...”

“... Heaven and Hell’ excludes Leicester from heaven principally on the grounds of lust. After St Peter has interrogated him at length about his involvement in various murders, extortions and usurpations, he is almost persuaded by a show of repentance to admit him even so. St Peter threw open the gate and his Earlship most ...”

“... him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his ...”

“... real liberation. Financed by the family trusts, she made her way in 1916 to the battlefields of France, where she drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross. Between runs to the trenches, she shared a flat in Montparnasse with several other girl-drivers, one of whom, Dolly Wilde, louche niece of Oscar and member of the expatriate lesbian circle around ...”

“... that she was writing a novel and that it was about a young man’s adventures in the South of France, her mother had apparently said: ‘I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’ (‘Billi’ was what her family called the young Sybille.) ‘God forbid, mummy,’ Billi replied. But mummy was sure of her ground: ‘One ...”