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“... prior to the 19th century, but it lacked the prestige it now commands. In 1660, for example, the French philosopher and essayist Samuel de Sorbière wrote the following on the subject of the amateur art historians in and around the Royal Academy of Painting: Their great aptitude consists in knowing how to identify the artist after glancing at a ...”

“... he tried to return to Geneva, he would not only be almost as vulnerable to the activities of the French authorities as he would have been in Paris, he would be a certain target of the Genevan authorities. In 1762, Switzerland did not exist as a political unit. The different cantons conducted their affairs under a variety of institutional arrangements, and ...”

“... and 1930, the period in which the novel is set. At this time it was a British colony, but had kept French as its official language and retained French civil and criminal laws. He first visited Rodrigues in 1902, and from then until 1939, when he was in his seventies and had abandoned all hope of returning, dedicated himself ...”

“... Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for example, that the Bayeux Tapestry, after narrowly avoiding destruction during the Terror, began to be treated with more respect and was even displayed in the Louvre when Napoleon was planning to follow the ...”

“... policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... Union, but her independent – and extreme – militancy caused a breach. In the words of David Mitchell, a biographer of Christabel Pankhurst, she became ‘an incorrigible freelance’. In the summer of 1913, newsreel cameras captured her running across the course of the most popular race of the year, the Epsom Derby, falling under a horse and lying ...”

“... anti-totalitarians, while many in France still admired the Soviet Union; in the late 1960s, French intellectuals became anti-totalitarian as younger Germans rediscovered the charms of Stalin and Mao (the Bonn government, meanwhile, was pursuing accommodation with the East via its Ostpolitik). It’s striking, too, that East European intellectuals have ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... Trinity – was used first by Louis VI on his coinage, and gradually became associated with the French royal house. The representation of the kings as being especially favoured by God was furthered by the elaborate ritual performed when the holy relic of the crown of thorns was brought to Paris in August 1239, and the subsequent construction of the ...”

“... title of Pictor philosophus, and at the beginning of the 20th he was co-opted into a trinity of French Classicists along with Corneille and Pascal. But on what uncharted seas was Poussin’s great mind voyaging? No one really had much idea until the publication of Anthony Blunt’s monograph in 1967, which argued that Poussin ‘thought in terms of ...”

“... a proletarian-chic Manhattan brasserie whose very name advertises its commitment to ‘authentic French working-man’s fare’ (steak and chips). From restaurant kitchens along the way come the shock-horror revelations (drugs, bugs and buggery, basically) that are the book’s biggest selling points and which, with the boost of a New Yorker amuse-bouche ...”

“... at all. His good fortune, he wrote in The View from Paris, his collection of essays on postwar French intellectuals, was to have entered on his professional life in the mid-1960s when Sartre was ceding the territory to Roland Barthes; when, as John put it, ‘the first rustlings of Literary Theory’ – he gave it capital letters – ‘were to be ...”

“... I’ve been having these bad dreams about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me ...”