Search Results

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... Union, London wine-merchants were stocking up their Edinburgh warehouses with duty-free wines from France, intending to sell them on the English market once the customs barriers came down. Defoe, himself a former wine-importer, deploring this attempt to defraud the public exchequer, sent a letter full of righteous indignation to Harley detailing ‘how easily ...”

“... pallid and had a club foot. Politically, one wanted to conquer the world, while the other thought France would do very well within its ‘natural boundaries’, and even conspired with the country’s enemies to put it back there. The two most familiar images of the men express the contrast eloquently. First, there is ...”

“... David Peterley’s Peterley Harvest was first published on 24 October 1960. The book had a curious history and, shortly before publication, stories began to appear in the press declaring it to be an elaborate hoax. The jacket of the book contained the information that David Peterley was the only son of an old Quaker family that had ‘lived in the Chilterns and been neighbours of Milton and the Penns ...”

“... Palmier’s sombre encyclopedia of exile, published in French in 1987 and now translated by David Fernbach, offers seemingly endless evidence of the ways in which exile often punished over and over again those who fled Germany after 1933. One story is symptomatic. Hans Bendgens-Henner, a pacifist refugee who had first settled in Holland, was expelled ...”

“... and many other horrific episodes. Burton also traces the way these effusions of blood seeped into France’s literary imagination, quoting liberally from the goriest passages of de Maistre, Bataille and Maurras. All these pages of blood, fire, dismemberment, gibbets, firing squads and the guillotine leave the reader with the impression of a culture devoted to ...”

“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...”

“... The​ newspaper Action française habitually referred to Léon Blum, France’s Socialist leader, as the ‘warlike Hebrew’ and the ‘circumcised Narbonnais’ (he represented a constituency in Narbonne). On 13 February 1936, Blum was being driven away from the National Assembly when he encountered a group of ultra-right-wing militants who had gathered at the intersection of the rue de l’Université and the boulevard Saint-Germain for the funeral procession of Jacques Bainville, one of the founders of Action française, a reactionary political movement as well as a newspaper ...”

“... is, in every sense, unapproachable and, for the present, inimitable. More might have approved David Hume’s epitaph on utopianism: ‘All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.’ However, for More this would have ...”

“... arguments. She shows how the concept actually worked in revolutionary politics in America and France, and briefly discusses its subsequent history, including its co-option by right-wing populists. Rosenfeld argues, quite explicitly, that the Age of Reason was just as much the ‘age of common sense’, especially when it came to democratic politics. At ...”

“... and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris (1985) and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995), can be described as a history of the decline and fall, and amazing final reprieve, of history-painting in France. Long cherished by the Academy of Painting and Sculpture as the highest and ‘noblest’ genre and ...”

“... Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering France’s quota of Jews for deportation. The name was familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named Anne Darquier, to whom she had become very close, and who had probably committed suicide. Were they ...”

“... Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened the way to a black victory. On 1 January 1804, the new state of Haiti declared its independence.The Haitian soldiers weren’t ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... anything except its duration? One answer is that it created a sense of nationhood, especially in France, or as Sumption puts it in his concluding remarks to this final volume, ‘war created the state and the state created the nation.’ Regional loyalties, to Brittany and Normandy, Maine and Burgundy, became subordinated, and in later centuries would have ...”