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“... William’s Angevin successors then created a power of continent-wide importance, an Anglo-French polity that represented these islands’ best effort yet at European integration; but it had fallen apart three times: successively in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. On the two occasions when competent and ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then ...”

“... about, regarded Avila’s saint with devotion, recited me mournful poems in French, and stared for hours at the wide blue ocean. And I, a lost soul, familiar only with the bodies of whores and the lash of the sea, listened in ecstasy, as to a saint, and found a child’s joy in her company. I gave her a cross to wear round her ...”

“... world’s most sought-after directors of cinematography. He is most closely associated with the French cinema, having shot nine of Truffaut’s films and seven of Rohmer’s, but recently his Oscar for Malick’s Days of Heaven has encouraged Americans to take a chance on this independent Spaniard who has three times been exiled – from Franco’s ...”

“... As Philip Elliott and Philip Schlesinger argue in their admirable paper, ‘Eurocommunism: Their Word or Ours?’ (the most original contribution to the volume edited by David Childs), the term ‘Eurocommunism’ constitutes in the first place a resource in the ideological repertoire of certain commentators who are vehemently opposed to the arrival in power, for purposes of serious social transformation, of any Communist Party in the West ...”

“... of the Sidney family since the middle of the 16th century. The most famous of the Sidneys, Sir Philip, included an affectionate account of Penshurst in his Arcadia, where it is thinly disguised as the house of Kalendar. A generation later Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To Penshurst’ celebrated the house as a landmark of antique virtue and antique ...”

“... lived was the Mauretania, that long-time Riband holder, a proud vessel which, when asked by a French Caribbean island, ‘Which ship are you?’ replied: ‘Which island are you?’ After helping to work up the new cruising craze she went to the breakers in 1935. In the early 1930s, which saw the dictators’ crack liners competing with the ...”

“... subjects of Barrow’s ‘double portrait’, his friends Quentin Crisp and the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor, were both children of the Home Counties. Crisp, who began life as Denis Pratt, found his way to bohemia from the Pooterland of Egmont Road, Sutton. O’Connor spent a significant part of his tumultuous life in Dorking, a fact which the local ...”

“... dreamy letters and poems like ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’. François Georges-Picot, a French consular officer in Beirut, also withdrew after war was declared. His legacy was a packet of letters implicating local notables in a conspiracy to detach Syria from the Ottoman Empire. Georges-Picot had lodged his papers at the American consulate and a ...”

“... a London audience of interested observers and fellow members of Lacy’s own Protestant sect: the French Prophets. This millenarian group, founded by Camisard refugees escaping persecution in France, had at its heart a number of divinely inspired prophets. When Lacy first encountered them, he found them telling of a ‘glorious Dispensation, touching the ...”

“... two children. His sole surviving daughter, Frances, married the poet and Protestant courtier Sir Philip Sidney. Cooper acknowledges the problems these gaps in the record pose to a biographer, but doesn’t shy away from sifting Walsingham’s motives and gauging the nature and depth of his religious beliefs. For Cooper, Walsingham is a man of principle ...”

“... out of a tunnel, we find stretches of straight historical-social narrative: a picture of the French Midi during the German occupation, for example. Freud is a considerable presence throughout – not swallowed whole, but acknowledged as an essential interpreter of our state. Happily it is the square old Freud we learnt at our mother’s knee ...”

“... adopted the so-called ‘Salic’ law of succession among males only. There have been no reigning French queens. The effort by the German Emperor Charles VI, the last male Habsburg, to arrange for his younger daughter to succeed to his hereditary lands led to Europe’s a being turned upside down. Others – the Iberians notably – allowed female succession ...”

“... told off in oracular fashion for picking the wrong subject for a fiction. She writes a story in French, and he finds out, then proceeds to congratulate her ‘on the way in which you’ve picked up every old worn-out literary phrase that’s been lying about the streets of Paris for the last twenty years, and managed to pack them all into those few ...”

“... novella The Subterraneans than to the disciplined delivery of the Six Gallery poets: McClure, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. The change in the status of the performers after that night, the way the luckiest of them became marketable brands, spokesmen for ecology, wilderness politics and ...”

“... for it. His hero is an American airman in North Africa, badly scarred from fighting (on the French side) during the First World War: this man, Charlie Halifax, is being punished, forced to serve in the French Foreign Legion during a futile war with the Arabs of Abdel Krim (who are secretly assisted by the ...”