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“... at Montoire, where the Führer’s train stopped on its way to and from a meeting with General Franco, and where on the return journey (the photograph is indisputable) Pétain grasped Hitler’s hand. Nothing much was decided there, but the impact of the photograph was disastrous. Pétain made things worse – ‘But I only took his fingers,’ he said ...”

“... a local artist and French propagandist during the period of Prussian rule which followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, a time when most Alsatians were largely indifferent to Kulturpolitik. Ungerer’s work most resembles Hansi’s in his illustrations to Das grosse Liederbuch (1975), a collection of German folksongs and nursery rhymes. Hansi was a ...”

“... daily newspaper Libération. The combination of the paper’s independence from the notorious Franco-African networks and my US passport represented Kagame’s best chance of an unbiased hearing in France, where government officials routinely referred to his rebel forces as the ‘Khmers noirs’. At the time, French public opinion made short shrift of ...”

“... time, mellowed his judgment: in 1943 he told his friend and future literary executor, the critic Jean Paulhan, that it was ‘the least successful work painted by Signac’. Worse for Fénéon, it established a template of profilism. Bonnard, Vuillard and Vallotton all depicted him in more or less the same pose: leaning forwards – bent into a near ...”

“... refuge while other politicians use it as a way of supporting their ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other ...”

“... was a reactionary, and was often French. The troublesome nature of the term was compounded by Jean-François Lyotard’s near-simultaneous usage (and definition) in 1979-82 from within the French intellectual tradition, and as a critic of Habermas. It briefly acquired an ascertainable meaning in architectural style; but very rapidly ...”

“... the house were surplus railway sleepers: this would date the construction to around 1902, when the Franco-Ethiopian railway first reached Dire Dawa, by which time Rimbaud would have been dead for 11 years. This has not deterred tourguides and sightseers, for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports ...”

“... and serving them up to the me-generation in a restaurant named after an old movie. The result is a Franco-Californian cuisine of almost ludicrous refinement, in which the simplest item is turned into an object of mystification. A ripe melon, for example, is sought for as if it were a piece of the True Cross. Ms Waters applauds herself on serving one. ‘Anyone ...”

“... plunges the narrator back into his memory of the war, suffers the same affliction, and so does Jean, the French police inspector. The narrator’s lover, Yelena, has a quick, lithe body, but her soul is sluggish. The characters are torn between past and present, choice and powerlessness, life and death. Very often the inner world prevails over the ...”

“... glance at the list makes the authors’ initial scepticism intelligible enough. The first name is Jean de Gisons (1188-1220), the last Jean Cocteau; those listed are either aristocrats of the House of Lorraine (among whose ancestors are numbered Godfroi de Bouillon, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Merovingian kings) or ...”

“... and appreciate. But this isn’t a painting. It’s a photograph taken in 1870, a document of the Franco-Prussian War. Look again and you notice that the bridge itself is missing, destroyed by the conquering Prussian army; its suspension cables dangle in the air. The men who might have made this picture had different priorities. Earlier in the ...”

“... war. What heroes has the Continent produced in our century? Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. Beside them those who did quiet good, like Tomas Masaryk or Henri Dunant, shone rather palely. Europe did not seem to be setting attractive political examples or pointing in desirable directions. Britain’s reluctance in 1945 to be involved with a ...”

“... or an idleness attuned to ‘the rhythm of life’. The life-story of a Breton peasant called Jean-Marie Déguignet, who ‘wrote his memoirs because he had never read about anyone like himself’, involves hunger, fire, war and a blow to the head from a horse’s hoof.* But where even a perceptive traveller like the English farmer Arthur Young would have ...”

“... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, that little football scholarship guy from Lowell, Massachusetts, had wanted his name on the wall too. Yes he did. A few years after his appearance on the Steve Allen Show, Kerouac’s name turned up on the bathroom wall of the White ...”

“... which life at La Borde presented. His soixante-huitard friends (La Borde’s director, Jean Oury, called them ‘the barbarians’) staged regular invasions of the clinic. During the day, there were performances in the courtyard: a Japanese mime troupe, a Maoist magician, sometimes the patients themselves – on Bastille Day, they dressed up as ...”