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“... virulent anti-semitism and died at the hands of a German firing-squad in 1944 crying: ‘Vive la France’? Marc Bloch was all these things. But curiously, when presenting his credentials in The Strange Defeat, his analysis of the reasons why France collapsed so rapidly and ignominiously in 1940, he added with evident ...”

“... and unpopular, in part because of the neo-liberal reforms Diouf implemented, under pressure from France and the US, in the early 1990s. Wade, a lawyer, emerged as the opposition leader. He was arrested for his part in protests that followed the 1988 election, but he and his Senegalese Democratic Party won the 2000 vote, and Diouf handed over power without ...”

“... those words General Joachim Murat dispersed the Council of Five Hundred in November 1799 and ended France’s first experiment with parliamentary democracy. The scene was the culmination of the 18 Brumaire coup, which enabled Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power. A British cartoon mocked ‘the Corsican crocodile dissolving the council of frogs’, but in ...”

“... work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it ...”

“... mention mistresses, because death in childbirth was common. Richard’s second wife, Isabella of France, died at nineteen; Henry’s first wife, Mary de Bohun, died at 24 after giving birth to her sixth child. The men lived longer, though not by much; plagues, battles and executions took a toll. Castor’s history turns on the acts of men in their ...”

“... the novel together. Zeller was 22 when Artificial Snow came out to terrific critical acclaim in France. One French reviewer called his talent ‘frightening’. Another spoke of ‘a precocious literary success’. Yet another said that Zeller ‘had landed on the literary world like a meteorite’. Another still declared him ‘disarming. More than ...”

“... the domain of memory and feeling’, ‘a full memorial book to the Jewish children deported from France’. Born of ‘an obsession to be sure that these children are not forgotten’, it is compiled by a man whose father fought for France in defence of what he believed to be its commitment to civic equality and, after the ...”

“... in an English translation in 1986) and is almost entirely confined to the history of odours in France. He makes no reference to the pioneering work on early modern smells by Mark Jenner, a British historian at the University of York. But Muchembled’s guiding assumption, that human reactions to smells are not innate, but are shaped by experience, is as ...”

“... bitter English doctor who watches and judges and ekes out her miserable retirement from the Villa Rose next door, and is, in Kitty’s words, an ‘evil old witch’. And yet the hint of magic turns out to be quite misleading, and Kitty’s early advantages are quickly cancelled out. Yes, it’s true, she does know the villa well, but her mother is not so ...”

“... quotes a 1971 letter in response to an invitation to write a political text about conditions in France: I don’t want to publish anything about France. I don’t want to be an intellectual. If I publish something about France, I’ll strike a pose as an intellectual. I am a poet. For ...”

“... Berkeley wondered in 1735 whether ‘credit be not the principal advantage that England hath over France ... [and] over every other country in Europe’.* The years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars present a little more of a problem. Britain was certainly the banker of the various coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet ...”

“... the Mansion House speech, that, like his colleagues, Ll.G. believed British aid to be essential if France was to survive a German attack. This is not a wholly satisfying explanation either of Lloyd George’s speech in July 1911 or of his silence three years later. Why should the despatch of a German gunboat to Agadir, and the failure of the German government ...”

“... Was it the young general of the Italian campaigns? Or was it the First Consul who provided France with institutions which had an unexpected longevity? Was it the almighty Emperor who met the Czar at Tilsit? When he abdicated in 1814, he reviewed his guard at Fontainebleau and set out for the humiliation of Elba. He had, in Chateaubriand’s ...”

“... of the iconography of the sublime had led to accusations of fascism, an international row with France and a campaign of direct action by his supporters, the St Just Vigilantes. ‘St Mary le Port, Bristol’ by John Piper (1940). Tintern lost its freshness and was succeeded by the apocalyptic visions of John Martin and the deathly gloom of ...”

“... me, that all the books and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of ...”