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“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... humanism. The distinction on which the book rests, between a rational, refined, mechanical French ‘civilisation’ and an inward, vital, organic German ‘culture’, also seems much less compelling now. It would have been familiar to Elias from Thomas Mann’s ‘Observations of an Unpolitical Man’(1918) and Alfred Weber’s writings, and it ...”

“... Die Horen and in works like Xenien. Goethe and Herder started off as friends then clashed over the French Revolution, literature and personal morals – the prudish Herder and his wife referred to Goethe’s partner Christiane Vulpius as a ‘whore’. Weimar’s golden age ended in the early 19th century. Herder died in 1803, Schiller in 1805, the duchess in ...”

“... his own. Beauty is no absolute guarantee of truth or morality; art may illuminate or corrupt. As David Perkins points out in Modernism and After, Pound is incomparable amongst modern poets for the rhythmic subtlety of his evocation of sensuous beauty, of the play of light and shade. For Perkins, this lyricism is the redeeming feature of his poetry. He ...”

“... placid and amiable of all artistic schools – those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general – may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground. There have been hints, of course – but Philip Conisbee’s book is in fact the first to ...”

“... about a cyber Pearl Harbor, as techno-Orientalist. Techno-Orientalism is a term invented by David Morley and Kevin Robins to describe the ‘Japan panic’ of the late 1980s. By that time, the Japanese economy, driven by non-stop technological innovation, had become the second largest in the world after the United States. Japan was the leading creditor ...”

“... that we can understand. It reminded me of the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), where the French woman talks about all she has seen in Hiroshima and the Japanese man responds: ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima.’ Marines marching in Danang in 1965. Is it a sign of civilisation that we want to tell the story of our disasters without breaking ...”

“... Latour published in 1819. Goody exposes this as a ‘paraliterary artefact’, a creation of the French urban bourgeoisie, whose modish romanticism inclined it to the notion that there exists a universal emblematic floral code, an ‘alphabet of the fields’, primarily for use between lovers. The fashion had one fruitful outcome for all the spuriousness of ...”

“... defeat in the 1993 election, which left the Party with 56 seats in a chamber of 577 Deputies. French voters, however, were indignant at being asked to perform ‘au bon plaisir du président’, as Le Monde put it – something which Jospin grasped more quickly than most. ‘What we are going to do,’ he said succinctly, ‘is to take our democratic ...”

“... sous les auspices de la reine (Paris, 1790) demonstrates a far from reverent attitude towards the French royal family. In one scene Lafayette is described having intercourse with Marie Antoinette while being simultaneously buggered by Bailly. Marie Antoinette declares that her only pleasure is to be foutue en con and wants to engage a whole regiment of ...”

“... Davy de la Pailleterie was born in Santo Domingo in 1760, the illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of ...”

“... obstinately failed to arise. The turning-point seems to have come, at any rate symbolically, with David’s Belisarius Begging Arms, the great success of the Salon exhibition of 1781. In David’s painting, a soldier stands in shocked amazement and sorrow at the spectacle of his one-time commander, the Emperor Justinian’s ...”

“... David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal portrait is so convincing that it is hard to see an official biography adding more than superfluous detail. He brings us close to the living temper of a poet who is still fairly unknown to English-speakers but who, through his impact on T ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... were arguing vigorously that the journals and other descriptive writings of explorers such as David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander MacKenzie were the first contributions to Canadian literature, and these works teem with a sense of the forests and prairies, lakes and rivers as the inexhaustible new land in which settlers had to strive to make ...”