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“... Sartre’s in discussions of existentialism grated on him, and helps to explain why he was so keen to disavow his ties to the movement.) He was an editor at Gallimard and the leader writer for Combat, the newspaper of the Resistance, which he’d joined in 1944 under the nom de guerre Albert Mathé. With his heroic wartime record, good looks (Camus ...”

“... many locations in Houllebecq’s novels) as a torrid den of anonymous sex. Yves Donnars was keen that his business should avoid an unearned reputation for sexualité de groupe, so he took Houellebecq to court. The author reluctantly changed the name in later editions. Fiction often seems like a form of revenge on the world; Houellebecq’s is an extreme ...”

“... this book. Only one of seven faces in a Jewish Boy Scout troop photographed in 1941 is identified: Maurice Wasserman, 14 in the picture, living at 6 rue Sevran in Grenoble with his parents and brother, Georges, deported 7 March 1944 on Convoy 69. On page 1043 is a snapshot of two Jewish boys boxing at a sports club at the Saint-Martin-de-Vésubie station in ...”

“... him down a notch or two, and reassert their affection. Has any other modern artist provoked so keen a transference from an indebted and resentful following? This posture of the disappointed enthusiast led Pauline Kael to describe Citizen Kane as ‘a shallow masterpiece’, and to forgive the man who made it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be ...”

“... religious and philosophical convictions’. (It is little wonder that the Liberal Democrats are so keen on the document, since it is exactly the sort of election manifesto that a lawyer might produce on their behalf.) Even from its Strasbourg base, and qualified though the property right is, the Convention has already exerted a powerful influence on the new ...”

“... American science of showbusiness’ was his uncle Arthur, an antiques dealer friendly with Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker. Arthur introduced him to the circus, then to nightclubs and music halls. As de Baecque points out, Melville’s gangster films invariably include a ‘fetish’ scene in a cabaret, a place set deep in ‘the heart of ...”

“... That sounds like fair comment. Among other contemporaries there were novelists who took a keen practitioner’s interest in developing new ways of relating fabula and syuzhet and, as a mark of their difference, avoiding the straightforward representation of causality, desiring to alter the emphasis, to light scenes in a way that could not be achieved ...”

“... Sylvester was conferred on him. His wife was Rose Waxman, a sister of two leading Yiddish actors, Maurice and Fanny Waxman, whose roles on the London and New York stages included Hamlet and Medea. My father was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Darlington, and always had a slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one ...”

“... Cook, in a fluent, almost boneless style with which I was familiar as it was also affected by Maurice Miles, the conductor of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. But the uncushioned pews were hard and the parish church, being Victorian, didn’t have much to catch the eye, so that by half-past nine I was aching for the finish, when we could get the tram ...”

“... plumped for his brother-in-law, Robert Bredon, another Ulsterman. Here the Foreign Office was not keen, however, and he had to settle for Francis Aglen, the son of his best friend at school, whom he had installed as Commissioner in Canton – the port where he had himself started. Even from the grave, his nepotism lived on. Aglen was briefly succeeded by ...”

“... that he was impatient to formalise it, seething at Brown’s antipathy to the new writers he was keen to employ. An instrumental figure here was Cyril Connolly, who had been hired over the objections of both Brown and Waldorf as the paper’s arts and books editor and quickly replaced the Observer’s old-guard reviewers, ‘bookmen’ like Brown, with ...”

“... empires, in the avuncular figure who proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority. At any rate, keen endorsement of either statesman is a distinctly bizarre way of registering any kind of objection to social engineering. Thus, there are contradictions in his view, but they languish from being untreated by their author. At least Lloyd George and ...”

“... philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was 18, he began a friendship with someone his own age, Maurice Abramowicz, who also loved books and poetry. It was the first of many such sustaining literary friendships. The Borges family spent the war years in Switzerland; once the war was over they moved to Spain: first to Barcelona, then to Majorca, then to ...”