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“... In the autumn​ of 1730, a 20-year-old woman in the southern French port of Toulon claimed that her spiritual director, a middle-aged Jesuit, had repeatedly forced her to have sex with him. When she became pregnant, he made her drink a potion that induced an abortion. He denied everything and accused her of slander ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... birth of their only child, Anne, a few months later, he gave his occupation as ‘landowner and French baron’ while Myrtle signed herself ‘Myrtle Marion Ambrosene Darquier de Pellepoix, formerly Lindsay-Jones’. Subsequently, and not merely to misdirect creditors, Callil observes, she answered to Sandra Lyndsay-Darquier, Cynthia de Pelle Poix and ...”

“... effect in his portrait of the merchant-industrialist Ivan Morozov, the great collector of modern French and avant-garde art, shown with a recently acquired work by Matisse. This colourful tempera with heavy black outlining echoing a Post-Impressionist approach allows Serov to paint in a modern French idiom: he is exploring ...”

“... published The Duel in European History, a thoughtful account that drew mainly on British and French evidence from the Early Modern period and presented the modern duel as an aristocratic residue. Five years later, Friedhelm Guttandin offered a variant on the same theme. Incorporating much more German material, his book used the duel to argue that ...”

“... Le Dieu caché: les peintres du Grand Siècle et la vision de Dieu, a collection of 63 French 17th-century religious pictures which can be seen at the Villa Medici in Rome until 28 January, Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor challenge us to take theology as seriously as aesthetics. They also prove that it requires more than a sensitive eye and a ...”

“... year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have been eight when Chinatown appeared, and ten or so when David Bowie recorded the song that gives this book its title. Specktor’s mother was a screenwriter whose career was short-lived; later she was a drinker who snarled at her son for asking her to stop. By then she was divorced from his father, who was a leading ...”

“... The French Revolutionaries identified the Enlightenment as the work of a small, brave band of 18th-century philosophes, whom they rushed to entomb as heroes in the gloomy crypt of the Panthéon. In the corrupt and desolate wasteland of the Ancien Régime, the Revolutionaries proclaimed, the philosophes had cast welcoming rays of light and reason, stirring the dull roots of popular discontent ...”

“... Once upon a time, before the Channel Tunnel was built, there were two contemporary French novelists. Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45, and nobody in England who was not a French specialist had ever heard of him. With Philippe Sollers it was different. Editor of the avant-garde theoretical journal Tel Quel, and associate of literary and psycho-analytic thinkers such as Barthes, Kristeva and Lacan, his was a name of which no self-respecting British intellectual could afford to remain entirely ignorant – though his novels, so far as I can discover, were neither translated nor read ...”

“... government rather than opposition was memorably analysed ten years ago by Linda Colley in Britons. David Bell, a colleague of Colley when she was writing that book, now offers a parallel analysis of the French case. It has often been claimed that the French Revolution invented ...”

“... 1779, as a translation of a translation: The Sorrows of Werther: A German Story was based on the French version. Translations of French novels made up a large part of the fiction published in England in the 18th century; English authors on their own seem to have been unable to satisfy the expanding market, and the whiff of ...”

“... has done as much as anyone to demonstrate its promise in a series of luminous studies on the French Revolution that draw profitably on anthropology, literary theory and psychoanalysis. For instance, in The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992) she explored how changing visions of family relations in ...”

“... wife on the place d’Armes in the centre of Calais, have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK. Afghans appear to be in the majority, but there are also Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Sudanese. The Jungle houses a ...”

“... in the European Union, nor the most powerful, nor even the most vocal. (It’s the tragedy of the French political classes, Siedentop suggests, to be burdened with ambitions for Europe which dare not speak their name; the very word étatisme can’t be translated without putting people off – in Siedentop’s terms it translates as something like ...”

“... it. Now here are two books, one by an American art historian, the other by a British professor of French, which represent major journeys of exploration deep into its heart. Professor Charlton’s is the less ambitious of the two. Because its approach is less overwhelmingly a visual one, it also offers the easier way in. Following in the footsteps of Daniel ...”