Search Results

“... kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an ...”

“... include a picture of Europe on the point of being overrun by totalitarian sun-worshippers (the French bare their massed nipples, and the British their ‘fearsome buttocks’, in confrontations with the riot police), and a ‘Secret History of World War Three’ in which we learn that the war ran for four minutes on 27 January 1995, but nobody really ...”

“... German, Hebrew and Yiddish barely so. The aristocrats like to address one another in English or French, and their spiritual home, needless to say, is Paris. Wokulski’s dogged perseverance in taking lessons from the red-whiskered Mr William Collins, teacher of English, pays off at a crucial moment in the plot, when he overhears a conversation not meant for ...”

“... Iran, while Offred herself is aware of the relevance of Nazi Germany. (In place of the Free French operating from Britain, Gileadeans can tune in to the broadcasts of Radio Free America emanating from Cuba.) In a telling scene Offred and her companion, each of whom views the other as a possible spy, are accosted by a group of Japanese tourists who stare ...”

“... take it for granted that the regime is entering its last days. A justification for the British and French argument that the EU embargo on arms deliveries to the rebels should be lifted – a plan first mooted in March but strongly opposed by other EU members – is that these extra weapons will finally tip the balance decisively against Assad. The evidence ...”

“... Countries like Egypt, which gained independence sixty years ago when Nasser survived British, French and Israeli attack during the Suez crisis, are once again the dependencies of global or regional powers, a fact underlined earlier this year when Egypt handed over to Saudi Arabia two islands in the Red Sea which it had long held as part of its national ...”

“... cells’ that turned out to be mythical. But one Raqqa resident talks of the French teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and was decapitated by an IS supporter. The SDF refused to investigate the demonstrations in Raqqa in support of his killer. ‘The SDF will make us victims of IS again to get ...”

“... just, pull us back from the brink. A lot of ecological writing reads as if it were translated from French. Like the jungle itself, it is gloomy, impenetrable and portentous. Wilson’s book begins in the worst traditions of the Rainforest School. However, it soon gets very much better. In places, indeed, it moves along so briskly that it reads more like a ...”

“... ultimately perpetuating the relations of power between groups’. It would be odd if English and French study of the Celtic-speaking peoples of Britain, Ireland and Brittany were somehow a benign exception – especially as the negative tone had already been set by classical writers. The Greeks and Romans were naturally terrified by the arrival of the Celts ...”

“... Lothario, or he may be seen as the devil incarnate. His populist sympathies for Tom Paine and the French Revolution, which help to give him away, incline some of his hearers to the latter view. For Coleridge, however, his worst crimes were against the family: here was a man who had abandoned his wife and starving children and set out, under a false name, to ...”

“... at the beginning of revolutions and the bloodbath at the end has many precedents, from the French Revolution on. But over the last twenty years in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus the rapid degradation of what started as mass uprisings has been particularly striking. I was in Moscow at the start of the second Russo-Chechen war in October ...”

“... pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that reference water: vast bodies of ...”

“... there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who has for many years been a crime reporter for a nationwide ...”

“... stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to Europeans’. In 1898, Baedeker simply told tourists that they ‘present an unpleasing exterior’. The ...”

“... effect on the morale of the Arabs’. The Spanish practised the technique in Morocco, as did the French – who also dropped bombs on Syria and even designed a special ‘colonial’ plane which allowed its airmen to ‘sit in the shade with plenty of space for their machine guns and shoot the indigenes in comfort’. The British bombed revolutionaries in ...”