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High Anxiety

Julian Barnes: Fantin-Latour, 11 April 2013

Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in 19th-Century French Painting 
by Bridget Alsdorf.
Princeton, 333 pp., £30.95, November 2012, 978 0 691 15367 4
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... more than a brief, pitying glance at the likes of Louis Cordier, Zacharie Astruc, Otto Scholderer, Pierre-Elzéar Bonnier, Jean Aicard, Arthur Boisseau, Antoine Lascoux and so on. And our pity contains an admixture, not exactly of guilt, but of unease: we are the posterity that has consigned them to oblivion. We look at these pictures – at first, anyway ...

Wide-Angled

Linda Colley: Global History, 26 September 2013

The French Revolution in Global Perspective 
edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson.
Cornell, 240 pp., £16.50, April 2013, 978 0 8014 7868 0
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... hard. The book concludes with a deeply interesting and provocative essay by the Sorbonne historian Pierre Serna entitled ‘Every Revolution Is a War of Independence’. ‘The European continent,’ he writes, ‘can no longer be studied in isolation, as a central place from which would emerge the impetus for action in the New World,’ which is correct. But ...

Cite ourselves!

Richard J. Evans: The Annales School, 3 December 2009

The Annales School: An Intellectual History 
by André Burguière, translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Cornell, 309 pp., £24.95, 0 8014 4665 1
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... with a heavily quantitative emphasis. A leading role was taken by demographic historians such as Pierre Goubert, whose study of the Beauvais region in the 17th and 18th centuries appeared in a new series of monographs on demography and society published from 1960 on. These dealt with real people as well as with statistics, though often the people were seen ...

Melancholy Actions

Charles Glass: Scuttling the French Fleet, 17 December 2009

England’s Last War against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-42 
by Colin Smith.
Weidenfeld, 490 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 297 85218 6
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... the Germans asked for the use of airfields in Syria and Lebanon. Darlan, who had replaced Pierre Laval as Pétain’s deputy in December 1940 in what de Gaulle called ‘a palace revolution that expelled the Grand Vizier’, met Hitler in Berchtesgaden in May 1941 to accede to Germany’s request for use of the airfields. Britain responded by invading ...

Which came first, the condition or the drug?

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Bipolar Disorder, 7 October 2010

Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder 
by David Healy.
Johns Hopkins, 296 pp., £16.50, May 2008, 978 0 8018 8822 9
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... people were gathered in asylums. Before this, it would have been impossible to identify, as Jean-Pierre Falret and Jules Baillarger did independently in 1854, a ‘circular insanity’ or folie à double forme characterised by a regular alternation of manic excitation and melancholic depression. In 1899, Emil Kraepelin wove all these threads into what he ...

In Praise of Spiders

Caleb Crain: Wilkie Collins’s Name Games, 11 September 2008

The Woman in White 
by Wilkie Collins.
Vintage, 609 pp., £5.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 951124 3
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... East London. The ménage bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the second half of Melville’s Pierre (1852) – the hero moves to urban bohemia to live out a rescue fantasy with two women, one dark and the other fair, in chaste superiority to society’s misunderstanding, and struggles to make a living from his art – and a similar miasma of incest and ...

Electric Koran

Richard Vinen, 7 June 2001

Services Spéciaux Algérie 1955-57: Mon témoignage sur la torture 
by Paul Aussaresses.
Perrin, 198 pp., frs 99, May 2001, 2 262 01761 1
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Appelés en Algérie: La Parole confisquée 
by Claire Mauss-Copeaux.
Hachette, 332 pp., frs 140, March 1999, 2 01 235475 0
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... Most important, the massacre of Algerians in October 1961 occurred in the centre of Paris, and Pierre Messmer, de Gaulle’s Minister for the Army, pointed out that, if it was to be considered a criminal act, the crime was one that implicated every member of the Government, ‘from the humblest secretary of state to the President’. In his ...

Somewhat Divine

Simon Schaffer: Isaac Newton, 16 November 2000

Isaac Newton: The ‘Principia’ Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 
translated by I. Bernard Cohen.
California, 974 pp., £22, September 1999, 0 520 08817 4
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... As the introduction to this new translation points out, it was only with the triumphant work of Pierre Simon Laplace, more than a century later, that the tasks set by the ‘Principia of legend’ were finally accomplished. Though published in other European languages, within Britain the founding text of the nation’s mathematical physics was digested in ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... Carman’s clients later in his career were household names: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Marco Pierre White and Elton John, Robert Maxwell and Richard Branson. There were also memorable victories against Jonathan Aitken on behalf of the Guardian and Neil Hamilton on behalf of Mohammad Al-Fayed. Aitken sued over various allegations, ranging from a claim ...

Maaaeeestro!

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Gabriel García Márquez, 27 August 2009

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life 
by Gerald Martin.
Bloomsbury, 668 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 7475 9476 5
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... of celebrity, García Márquez, like Hemingway, has fallen victim to a twisted version of what Pierre Bourdieu once called the ‘biographical illusion’. Perhaps it takes a biography like this one for us to understand that, and in any event it does not diminish him as one of the great novelists of the last half-century. But it leaves one wishing, for the ...

Horrible Heresies

Jonathan Rée: Spinoza’s Big Idea, 16 March 2017

The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. II 
edited and translated by Edwin Curley.
Princeton, 769 pp., £40.95, June 2016, 978 0 691 16763 3
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... and the Holy Office put it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Towards the end of the century, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique identified Spinoza as the architect of ‘the most monstrous hypothesis imaginable’, namely ‘systematic atheism’, and denounced him as the founder of a disreputable sect. But Bayle was not too worried: anyone who ...

At the Fondation Louis Vuitton

Julian Barnes: The Shchukin Collection , 19 January 2017

... for his Moscow staircase in 1909. When, many years later, the painter’s art-dealing son Pierre was asked if his father could have painted such enormous canvases without Shchukin, he replied, ‘Why? For whom?’ (Are they now too fragile to travel?) The next surprising absence is what Shchukin didn’t buy. Acquiring his Picassos between 1909 and ...

Hickup over the Littany

Peter Phillips: What did it sound like?, 14 December 2023

The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings and Art c.1200-1770 
by Andrew Parrott.
Taverner, 544 pp., £35, December 2022, 978 1 915229 54 0
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... convincing, living interpretation.One of the most persistent critics of the authenticity drive was Pierre Boulez. ‘What is authenticity anyway?’ he wrote in 1988.The more we tire ourselves out searching for it, the more it escapes us. Minds that have not experienced the era of the works that are being reconstituted cannot possibly know their reality and ...

Snobs, Swots and Hacks

Jonathan Parry, 23 January 2025

Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite 
by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman.
Harvard, 317 pp., £20, September 2024, 978 0 674 25771 9
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... exerted themselves to support one another and prop up the family’s status. The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu, along with their own interviews, to demonstrate that a financially secure upbringing can encourage children to take investment risks, knowing that there is a security blanket if things go wrong. Again, we know this already. It seems that few ...

Goodbye Glossies

Amy Larocca: Vogue World, 1 December 2022

A Visible Man 
by Edward Enninful.
Bloomsbury, 265 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 5266 4153 3
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... and at the museum of modern art in Niteroi, Brazil, the next. Dior staged an extravaganza at Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles outside Cannes, and Gucci organised elaborate pyrotechnics for its show in an ancient Roman cemetery near Arles.Enninful’s book has its own dramatic contrasts, between his early childhood on a Ghanaian military base, hearing the ...

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