Search Results

“... exhibited such phases. Here the width of Professor Charlton’s canvas proves its worth. France, he finds, lagged well behind England in the preliminary phase of awakening to natural scenery. The English were alive to pastoral attractions as early as the 1720s and markedly so by the 1740s, but it was not till the 1760s that the French showed a ...”

“... of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the ...”

“... France, it has often been said, is a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of Versailles ...”

“... preached a Jewish return to Zion. Chapter 1, ‘Could It Be Now?’, begins with the appearance of David the Reubenite in Venice some time around Hanukkah in 1523. Calling himself ‘son of Solomon and brother to King Joseph’, ruler of the lost tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that dwelt in the far east of myth, beyond the Sambatyon (‘a river so Jewish ...”

“... Empire, which Russia was used to bullying, was being bullied more effectively by Britain and France. In response to the invasion, Sultan Abdulmejid I declared war on Russia, and Britain and France sent ships to the Bosphorus to protect him against attack. On 30 November 1853, Russian missiles destroyed the Ottoman navy ...”

“... The NPT held that the countries which already had nuclear weapons – the US, USSR, China, France and Britain – could keep them: they were the ‘nuclear club’ and no one else could join. In return they would supply peaceful atomic technology (as they were already doing under the Atoms for Peace programme), and would themselves move towards ...”

“... climate and its hunting – the fashionable area around Pau was known as ‘the Leicestershire of France’. He spoke French before he learnt English and retained several Gallic traits, including an extremely rapid manner of speaking. He was also educated privately and so, unlike the great majority of officers, escaped the conditioning of the public ...”

“... studies of the 19th-century duel: Robert Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France nicely complements Ute Frevert’s Ehrenmänner (‘Men of Honour’) of 1991, a book that is close in subject-matter – although not in interpretation – to the one reviewed here. The duel derived from the French medieval cult of chivalry, with its ...”

“... weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on France in 1848. When Nietzsche elaborated on the same idea in one of his ‘untimely meditations’, he had Germany in mind, the Prussia-writ-large created under the auspices of Bismarck. We have become familiar with the idea that the dead weight of Prussian ...”

“... appear amenable to massive concentrations of firepower, regardless of the long-term consequences. (France, which is a hybrid model under its presidential system, is also moving this way.) Unencumbered executive leaders worry about being lumbered with the blame for any failures of national security, because their autonomy leaves them exposed to carrying the ...”

“... study The Culture of Clothing, has termed ‘the hierarchy of appearances’. In 18th-century France, a plain black coat, waistcoat and breeches, with white silk stockings, was the distinctive dress of the middle-class male professional – middle-class women were more colourful. Noblemen had the privilege of wearing a sword, and could dress their ...”

“... way foreigners had sliced off portions of its historic territory under a Russian-imposed King. And France, even as Johnson spoke, was still echoing with applause at the return from exile of the magistrates of the parlements on the accession of Louis XVI, an event hailed by their supporters as a patriotic triumph. By 1789 the word ‘patriotic’ in ...”

“... On the surface, no two people in 19th-century France had less in common than Louis Pasteur and Bernadette Soubirous. Pasteur, the great icon of modern biological science, was a French national hero, a pillar of the academic establishment: the very embodiment of modern, rational, liberal civilisation. Soubirous was a miserably poor, tubercular peasant girl, illiterate, unable to speak anything other than Pyrenean patois, who claimed, in February 1858, to have seen a miraculous apparition in a grotto near the village of Lourdes ...”

“... these non-stop flyers mate on the wing is something for which, according to the chief authorities (David Lack and Derek Bromhall), there is no firm evidence. I have watched them for nearly sixty years, at home in North-East Scotland and Westmorland, in the Dolomites and on Gibraltar, and from high up on the Blouberg in Transvaal, and their closest intimacy was ...”

“... instead of the lives of common people is that the real horrors of places like 17th-century France are becoming far less palpable to students. New critical studies of Louis are more likely to speak about the way corpses featured in various discourses than about actual corpses, more about ‘representations of famine’ than famine itself. What was once ...”