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“... objected to the breadth of his canvas. Give us back the tidy Reformation we used to know about, Paul Johnson complained, something which began in 1517 and ended with the Council of Trent in 1563. This misses the point by several miles. Only by taking the story far into the 17th century can MacCulloch plot the line and plumb the depth of the greatest ...”

“... influence of Durkheim with its special emphasis on structures. Both Raymond Aron and more recently Paul Veyne admit the influence of the sociological methods of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber in underscoring the specificity of historical events. In De la Connaissance Historique H.-I. Marrou attacks the narrow concept of what ...”

“... in one attractive volume. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival an American film, Mishima, by Paul Schrader caused considerable controversy; and in the spring I saw in Paris Jean-Louis Barrault’s company performing Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays, beautifully translated by Marguerite Yourcenar and directed with iconoclastic verve by Maurice Béjart. I ...”

“... leaving them with ‘in name a democracy, but in reality a government in the hands of the first man’. One presumes Giscard knows this, unless the preamble to his preamble was chosen by some exhausted functionary from the dictionary of useful quotations for occasions when jokes are not required. But then again, as, on this occasion, jokes were not ...”

“... from the outside: Walter and Patty, the pioneering gentrifiers of a once down-at-heel street in St Paul, Minnesota, are popular, liberal, but not quite knowable. Their teenage daughter, Jessica, is straightforward; their handsome teenage son, Joey, excessively doted on by his mother, is perversely attracted to the Monaghans, the working-class Republicans next ...”

“... he sent the regime a public telegram demanding information.He spoke with controlled rage, as a man used to having his orders obeyed. He gave an account of having to identify the body of his cousin, the diplomat Elena Holmberg, found in a river in 1978. Holmberg had been summoned back to Buenos Aires from Paris, with her loyalty to the regime under ...”

“... of Pure Reason as encompassing all the interests of his reason, were also those which Jean-Paul Sartre pursued throughout his life, however different he intended his answers to be from those of Kant. Few thinkers in our time have pressed these questions with Sartre’s perseverence and imagination: but his subtle exploration of the first question ...”

“... novelist Alfred Döblin likened the ruins of the Tietz Palace, a Berlin department store, to ‘a man whose neck has been snapped with one blow, whose skull has been driven down onto his chest’. The flattened cities made onlookers think of natural disasters: Dagerman found Germany ‘drearier than the desert, wilder than a mountain-top and as far-fetched as ...”

“... lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (1897-1962); Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968), the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and stylesetter Madge Garland ...”

“... neglected her only daughter, born in 1913, when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with Colette? Lydia Davis suggests it might be, in her ...”

“... Coetzee, one of the bombers of the Worcester Shopping Mall in 1996, who came across as a wrecked man. Four people died in Worcester and 67 were injured, many of them seriously. Coetzee had been a member of the white Afrikaans Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) and an admirer of Wit Wolf Barend Strydom, who in 1988 massacred seven black people ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were queer women. ‘Miss Barney’s circle was not ...”

“... dance of the intellect, if you will, and in these qualities have an affinity with the painting of Paul Klee. His syntax plays a critical role, with its orderings, the alternating presences and absences, its copulae or want of; clauses gone floating from the main substantive and verb; periodicity, abrupt declarative bursts. The poems have a tense, torqued ...”

“... monkey to modern woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire caricature of her (it seems to move on the page of Petrine Archer-Straw’s book) was the prototype for his subsequent mobiles.‘I never saw anybody move the way she did. She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman ...”