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“... André Breton. Walter Benjamin considered that Baudelaire’s poetry reflected the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work. Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled something familiar. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the ...”

“... This was a work whose reputation travelled, from Leipzig to Lisbon, from St Petersburg to Paris. Dubious anecdotes about apples and rhetorical flourishes about God’s handiwork proliferated in its wake. One witty Frenchman, Newton’s first biographer, compared his subject’s genius with the Nile – none knew its source, and it only showed itself ...”

“... from midday till late evening, when he is slow and very slurred,’ according to the diary of Bernard Donoughue, one of his kitchen cabinet. Like Heath, Wilson was ill – ‘run-down’, as people used to say. Persistent colds, stomach pains, a racing heart, moments of forgetfulness and bewilderment: all of these attended cabinet meetings along with the ...”

“... Hebdo. In October, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine suburb of Paris, was beheaded after he showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils during a civics class on freedom of expression. A few days later, three people were murdered, and several injured, in a knife attack at the basilica of Notre-Dame in ...”

“... Bernard Levin recently summed up in one sentence the most ambiguous form of mental sickness in our age: ‘But there are those who live by an enervated reason that owns no master in the soul, and who can find arguments that enable them to claim that the atrophy of the moral sense from which they suffer is in fact a form of rational judgment ...”

“... but he still methodically noted in the margin that the barometer stood at 27’ 2’’ (Paris measurement scale) at 7.00 a.m. after a bad storm. Yet all these thousands and thousands of measurements failed to yield reliable regularities. Part of the problem was that non-standardised instruments were being wielded by uncalibrated observers, as ...”

“... back home, Marian would be able to complete her BA. At least, that was the plan.They arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1924, after spending the summer – and too much of Marian’s money – in Dieppe. For most of the next few years Marian was stuck at home with the children (Adam, officially named Milman, was born in February 1928) while Milman was in ...”

“... pauvre bête,’ François Magendie, whose physiological demonstrations to medical students in Paris attracted particular opprobrium, used to say to the dog writhing under his knife. Magendie’s pupil, Claude Bernard, perhaps the greatest physiologist of his time, was hounded by an outraged public, among them his own ...”

“... hatreds’, like the Bosnians’. Only occasionally – on the grounds that Beirut was ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ – were they also ‘just like us’. A Lebanese friend drives me through Beirut. The Baghdad highway at peak bandit time is nerve-racking, but this is scarier. I suppose all these lunatics have reflexes sharpened by years of ...”

“... that she was highly accomplished and already well-known in Austria, a prizewinner in the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In one of the catalogue essays the potter Edmund de Waal sets her in the Viennese context. Her career began there at a moment of flux, somewhere towards the end of the Wiener Werkstätte and the beginning of Modernism. It was this ...”

“... of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, when it became part of the newly restored Poland. The historian Bernard Wasserstein first heard of the town as a child in the 1950s, when his mother told him it was where his father came from. Abraham (‘Addi’) Wasserstein wouldn’t speak of the place. His son grew up wondering about ‘this almost unmentionable, and ...”

“... not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped for ...”

“... philosophy was maintained under Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, as towers came to dominate the Paris skyline and the French population as a whole fell under the sway of gigantism and gadgets. But as John Ardagh points out in the revised edition of France Today, when Mitterrand challenged Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the confrontation was between a more ...”

“... desire, a trip on the Metro, is asked by her mother what she has done during her brief stay in Paris. J’ ai vieilli, she says. Not: I have lived or learned or suffered or even necessarily, as Barbara Wright’s otherwise excellent translation has it, ‘I’ve aged’. Zazie may have aged but the idea is more sententious than anything else she says, and ...”

“... in at Hawaii en route for Saigon, he went ashore and bought a book about Vietnam by the late Bernard Fall. ‘Shit, this is what I’m getting into.’A revolutionary moment requires both extraordinary times and extraordinary people, and Ron Ridenhour, despite his laconic attitude, was one of the latter. He wouldn’t have denied, however, that there was ...”