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“... great man,’ Nagel says, ‘does things on a large scale! He doesn’t just live in Paris, he occupies Paris.’ ‘I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses,’ the hero of Hamsun’s play At the Gates of ...”

“... Fortunately, the text of The Middle East has not been written by the author of the captions. Bernard Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, is a fluent, lively, erudite and lucid writer. He also has an eye for the pointillist anecdote and pithy maxim culled from the primary sources. His book appears in a ‘History of ...”

“... Jewish mathematician who had a one-night stand with a woman in Havana. Her mother soon settled in Paris; her father committed suicide when Mariane was nine. Her mother-in-law belonged to an old Baghdad Jewish family which had decamped to Israel, where she married a man named Judea – unhelpful antecedents for a journalist investigating the terror trail in ...”

“... next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf. None of them would have found it strange that he was reading up the history of past sporting events. The other, more chilling observation seeks to assure us that, in spite of the beliefs of what he calls ‘Anglo-Saxon circles’, sport is as popular ...”

“... almost uniquely among les Anglo-Saxons at that time – enjoyed. He was a great lover of Paris, where he spent many years and had many friends – the greatest compliment ever paid him, he says, was to be called ‘un titi parisien’. Yet he held that too much Revolutionary history had been Parisocentric. A provincial angle of vision, grounded in ...”

“... it’s just badly pronounced French.’ In this engaging and sometimes infuriating essay, Bernard Cerquiglini – linguist, medievalist, member of Oulipo, advisor to successive French governments on linguistic affairs – pushes Clemenceau’s statement further, arguing that ‘the global success of English is a homage to Francophonie.’ Anyone ...”

“... as Charles Edward and his wife plan to carry Peggy off with them on their long-awaited escape to Paris. ‘The Married Son’ has been criticised as doing little to advance the plot, but it did more or less provide subsequent contributors with a map for the ending. Alice Brown had only to decide that Stillman Dane just happened to be booked on the same ...”

“... exactly these different areas of London? No such doubts exist for Mr Lottman. There is an area in Paris which is called ‘the Left Bank’ and which is geographically recognisable in relation to the River Seine. But whilst Bretons were to be found around the Gare Montparnasse on the same principle that Irishmen are to be found in Camden Town, because it is ...”

“... The Paris-Madrid road race of 1903 was a wonderfully disgraceful affair. Three hundred cars set out, conferring death and dismemberment along the dust-choked roads south. Six of the drivers were killed outright and nearly twice as many gravely injured. The hospitals were stuffed with mangled sightseers. By the time the surviving drivers reached Bordeaux the race was called off, and in Madrid the garlanded welcome arches were quietly dismantled ...”

“... significance, and we are shown how Van Gogh, painting scenes in rural Brabant and in the Paris suburbs, latched onto the symbolisms of predecessor artists to affirm his own sentiments about life. Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) derives from the metonym that Luke Fildes devised in 1870 when he represented the death of Charles Dickens by picturing his vacant ...”

“... by her own itinerancy: she was born in Beirut to a Greek mother and Turkish father, studied in Paris and then in the US, where she lived in Sausalito, before returning to Beirut again, Sausalito again, then Paris again, with another home in Erquy, on the coast of Brittany. As a child, she spoke Greek and Turkish at ...”

“... Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard Leach, the explorer Henry Savage Landor and the sculptor Kathleen Bruce, later the wife of Captain Scott. Bruce found Eileen ‘loveable, though rather remote’, and noted that she lived in constant fear of inheriting a strain of family madness. (Another ...”

“... Before​ the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s ...”

“... as a bit Widmerpudlian in Oxford in those days. The war put an end to a spell of research in Paris, and after failing the army medical he used family contacts to vault from a desk job at the Air Ministry to a liaison role with the British-armed Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade. A gifted linguist, he then shifted to liaison with the Poles; he was ...”

“... maverick who wrote some not very successful novels, a lively account of a few hard weeks in Paris, a quirky book about the miners that was somehow combined with an attack on sandalled vegetarian socialists, and another about the Spanish Civil War that some reviewers praised but nobody read. Six hundred of the 1500 print-run for Homage to Catalonia were ...”