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“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... because of Volkswagen. America ran the world because of General Motors. Italy made Fiats and France made Peugeots, Japan made Toyotas, and even the Russians, struggling along the highway towards modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it ...”

“... remarked with an icy stare to a writer from the New York Times in 1993 – and having lived in France for fifty years, he underestimated the Anglo-American appetite for dirt. He had known for a while that an American biographer, Dean King, was on his case, and had told his friends to give King nothing. But Fenton’s and the BBC’s revelations forced King ...”

“... the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of ...”

“... for his technique. True, he spent a lot of Beaverbrook’s money on regular lunches at L’Ecu de France but many of his guests would have sung like canaries without a cork being drawn. To take just one example, a frequent lunch companion from the start was Fred (later Sir Frederick) Brundrett, who when Pincher got to know him was deputy to Sir Henry Tizard ...”

“... series presenting adaptations of Sade’s works by Buñuel, von Stroheim, Pasolini, Guy Debord, Peter Brook and Nagisa Oshima. Meanwhile, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has published its fourth volume of Sade, a lavish 1150-page edition of the great erotic writings: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine. The works span the decade ...”

“... interest – and his bosses had known what he was doing. In his closing remarks, the prosecutor, Peter Wright, picked out something said by another of the defendants, Ben O’Driscoll, who had been a deputy news editor at the Sun. In 2010, Virginia Wheeler’s ‘Chelsea Copper’ had told her that a singer’s sister had been impaled on railings. ‘She’s ...”

“... have prevented him from becoming prime minister. In his last letter to Knox before leaving for France, he wrote: ‘I’m going to be rather odd. I’m not going to “pope” until after the war (if I’m alive).’ Volunteering for the war meant that at Oxford, as at Eton, he stayed only half the course, being ‘sent down by the Kaiser’ as he liked to ...”

“... the villages dirty and charging high prices’) ‘may well encode experiences touring in France with both Ezra and Wyndham’. Furthermore, the glimpse of six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver ‘may well transcribe a fear of betrayal by the others in the gamble of making it new – with the “open door” the birth-canal of the ...”

“... united by their active interest in Protestantism: Marguerite gave protection to the Huguenots in France, and her own work was denounced as heretical by the Sorbonne. Over Elizabeth and Catherine fell the shadow of another woman of gifts and intelligence, who was a queen herself for a spell: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. In an age when Thomas More showed ...”

“... the personages of the royal family by such names as Magnolia and Honey Suckle. She notes that in France it is perfectly correct for a woman to receive a man caller in her bedroom – a social convention that, when practised in England by a visiting Frenchwoman, makes ripples in the plot of Evelina. She laments that the French translation of her latest ...”

“... The mistake which most contemporary art historians make is that they assume Modernism was born in France, in the Cubist ateliers of Braque and Picasso, in the Fauvism of Matisse. This is not so. Braque and Picasso were searching for a new way of painting, not a new way of being. Their experiment in Cubism was little more than the temporary adoption of a ...”

“... the son of her SPD colleague Clara Zetkin, an idealistic young man 15 years her junior; with Peter Levi, her defence counsel in a spectacular political trial – they had a brief and intense affair in 1914; and Hans Diefenbach, the doctor with whom she conducted her ‘last romantic affair’ in her letters from prison. Newly discovered letters enable ...”

“... is not the same as a whole-hearted endorsement of far-right positions. Meloni may have warned France and Germany that ‘the party is over,’ but the Fratelli are condemned to continue the ‘reforms’ started by Draghi: if Italy doesn’t meet 55 ‘milestones’ by December, Brussels won’t release the billions the country desperately needs for its ...”

“... damage to the myth carefully cultivated at the time: which was that for Britain, unlike France, say, or the Netherlands, or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into ...”