Search Results

“... Then, on the basis of various points on this line, we are to construct a hexagram (a Star of David) inside a circle, which patterns the space at the top of the painting between one sitter and the other. Then, we are to observe that a horoscope square (the skeleton of a ‘geniture’, or birth-prediction of someone’s fortune) fits handily over the ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its global reach, but as David Kynaston shows in his official history, it has always had an uncertain relationship with the state, mediating awkwardly between the private imperatives of finance and the public demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... of Etienne-Jules Marey and Lucien Bull, and the popular adventures of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough. In another light Painlevé is a photographic modernist, attending to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street. On ...”

“... with associates who seem to have come from a hoary old joke: a Scotsman, a Native American and a French Moroccan. And the set-piece of the film occurs when this group, and a regiment of British soldiers who have long been stuck on one side of a no man’s land, take off after Diana, wipe out the German opposition and liberate a village. There is beer all ...”

“... of Kipling as a Sahib generates in the narrative the stylistic markers of cultural difference: the French idiom, the inverted commas, the simile, the dapper acknowledgement of trespass, the expansive double-edged irony of ‘modern civilisation’. Kipling discovers himself and India in relation to English (or European) purposes and standards. He discovers ...”

“... had an occupant. A small, gaunt, elderly man in a jacket and open-necked shirt stood in the French window. I think I remember a look of something like panic on his face as the gaggle of 19-year-olds approached. After a brief hesitation he turned and exited rapidly through the glass doors into the garden. I watched as he walked away from the ...”

“... were wholly welcome in the field; and much later, long after she had distinguished herself as a French Surrealist icon and a British war correspondent, her name could sometimes be confused with Lee Friedlander’s, even though he was a very different artist with a long-term, stable fame. Lee Miller’s fame kept growing, but it was unstable, even too ...”

“... poems, plays, political texts – are widely translated and read around the world. He was given a French state funeral and a plaque 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 ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... some of the best examples of ‘microhistory’ or ‘the new narrative’. This, pioneered in French by Le Roi Ladurie (Montaillou, 1975), and in English by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is ...”

“... valuable section of the book is the script itself. A pity its printing is small and spidery, and French, German and English versions run down each page in narrow, competitive columns. I would have thought a running counterpoint between dialogue and visuals (text and freeze-frames are firmly segregated) would have made for a much more stimulating book. The ...”

“... destroyed the systems of Imperial Germany and pre-Fascist Italy, and which crippled that of the French Third Republic. As in Germany, Italy and France, the crisis began to make itself felt before the First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be ...”

“... within the country, limiting itself to tendentious reports of ‘Amnesty in Guatemala’, ‘French Socialists lose election’ and the like: religion remains one of the few areas where the rival mouthpieces can confront each other directly, and they join battle with gusto. More significant are the Hierarchy’s attempts, many of them successful, to ...”