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“... it in 1999 with a knighthood in the Légion d’Honneur. Parker, Chirac said, has ‘served France by bringing prestige to the country with his particular gift’. He was the man who ‘taught America about French wine’, though it wasn’t long before Parker missed his annual tasting trip to France, citing family ...”

“... to what was going on in its bailiwick. In January last year, the citizens of Naples finally rose up in furious protests against the mounds of putrescence visited on them. The damage to centre-left rule was immeasurable. Two months later, its downfall combined, with peculiar local aptness, the outcomes of the tactical and moral blindness of the ...”

“... plant, while the German tutor she sees on her travels is a duck: Of course, while in Romantic France I met with Cupid and Romance. One glimpse at my rejected suitor – He was a handsome German tutor. But no! I would be no man’s wife … More appealing is a ‘dear friend’ she meets in the Tuileries: With flowers and little birds galore She quenched ...”

“... following, especially in his late years, when his work was anchored by climate change. In France environmentalist activism – ecology – had taken off in the late 1960s. It had to bide its time before it gained a foothold as a minority party-political movement, and even then at local, regional and European rather than national level. In round one of ...”

“... and college syllabuses and the pass Stein gets for her persistent, primitivist racialism. (‘Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people,’ she writes, typically, in ‘Melanctha’.) The racial reading of ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ and gloss on ‘St Louis Blues’ are of course blatantly ‘literary’, which doesn’t go against ...”

“... are illuminating. His conviction that Wolsey’s policies were not affected by his pension from France – which was anyway a meagre proportion of his income – is given weight by his comparison of the 16th-century pension with the 20th-century business lunch. Both sweeteners may reinforce motives of policy: neither will be a substitute for them. Gwyn’s ...”

“... of GDP on fixed investment than the United Kingdom: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. Belgium spent a smaller share of GDP on fixed income than the United Kingdom. Comparable figures for other OECD ...”

“... as the ninth Marquess of Queensberry lay dying in his magnificent house in town, Emile Zola in France lovingly dusted the medal he had received a fortnight earlier for his services in the Dreyfus affair, and thousands of miles away Mafeking awoke to its hundred-and-first day of siege.’ Almost any historical novel that happened to concern itself with the ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... École Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1872. The school was a direct response to the Commune, to France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, and to a sense that its ruling class was bereft of talent, industry and imagination, its imperial and cultural mission a shambles. The university now known as Sciences Po was established as a new ‘crossroads of ...”

“... of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 feature films made over half a century he rarely did two takes of a ...”

“... to gain their freedom. Thanks to the active sponsorship of Russia and Britain, Austria and France, these groups won autonomy and then independence. By the end of the 19th century, Christendom had regained much of Ottoman Europe as well as the fringes of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Muslims – Circassians, Tartars, Bosnians and Turks – fled ...”

“... aid offered to them in their struggle by the West,’ the Times said of the Libyan rebels who rose up against Gaddafi during the Arab Spring in 2011; Western military intervention on behalf of the rebellion was ‘a good deed in a weary world’. Today, more than five years after Gaddafi’s fall in October 2011, Libya has been relegated to that class of ...”

“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... new modish effects, so that brilliant lipstick and nail varnish also came into their own as hems rose and breasts diminished, provocative shoes appeared and whalebone vanished; and Lee Miller seemed the perfect embodiment of this new feminine ideal. Everyone was aiming at it, but Miller at 18 apparently had a cool self-assurance and a strong-willed, unforced ...”