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“... Ecstasy​ and chastity. In Alphonse de Lamartine’s two most famous novels, a young man and woman seem to feel for each other what we usually think of as romantic love, but never become lovers, don’t kiss and hardly touch. The ostensible reasons for this are social and moral ...”

“... and Hitler, whose world-shaking career of war, genocide and destruction lasted a mere 12 years. Paul Preston’s massive biography, on which he has worked for many years, is not, he writes in his Prologue, ‘a history a 20th-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the ...”

“... In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince ...”

“... interviews with Hopper himself on the subject of his own life. Hopper wasn’t a reticent man, and he knew the celebrity value of the mythic over plain fact. His stories are always aware of public appetite and expectation. He tells of growing up in Kansas, spending a lot of time on his grandparents’ farm, lying around in the wheat fields watching ...”

“... franco-françaises, arising from the Paris Commune, the Resistance movements, or the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète formed by Algerian settlers, or should we think of them as civil wars? Often there is a reluctance to admit to the existence of civil wars as anything other than an accident or temporary aberration: many English historians have liked to ...”

“... for the story to resume. Morel’s activities, it turns out, had to do with elephants. A scruffy man with blazing eyes, a battered leather briefcase and a ‘slightly vulgar’ Parisian accent, he showed up one day at the Hôtel du Tchadien promoting the outlandish idea that it’s wrong to hunt elephants, especially for sport, and that without stricter ...”

“... in particular – viz the inevitable projection backwards onto the youth of what we know about the man. (Recall the story by Raymond Roussel of his discovery, in a dusty provincial museum, under glass, of the skull of Voltaire as a child.) For Kershaw, who knows the outcome, everything the young Hitler does is tainted in advance: not an act, not a feeling or ...”

“... As Roussel revealed in his posthumously published 1935 book Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, the image of a whalebone sculpture moving along rails of calves’ lungs, for example, came from the way the phrase baleine à îlot (whale/small island) can be made to yield baleine à ilote (flexible bone/Spartan serf), which was combined with a ...”

“... The Palais de Justice​ in Brussels is a product of civic and architectural delirium, a Circumlocution Office looming over the historically working-class Marolles district like a sinister, secular basilica. It’s bigger than St Peter’s in Rome, covering an area of 26,000 square metres, with reputedly the largest accumulation of stone blocks in Europe ...”

“... plantings of hybrids were outlawed for commercial purposes. Today they have all but disappeared. Paul questions how serious the phylloxera epidemic really was, pointing out that mildew was regarded as a more serious problem in the 1880s and that yields increased to compensate for the loss of vineyards. This may be correct, but the threat of phylloxera was ...”

“... output at a stroke. But in another way, it does remarkably little to change the sense one has of Paul Muldoon. It is a book for initiates, more of the same. Each of his previous five volumes has ended with something a little longer, a relaxing gallop after the dressage – even ‘The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi’ in New Weather (1973) was four pages ...”

“... l’ Aquarium, for tea and tartines. Dinner at eight chez Jean-Claude, round the corner in rue de Picpus, an immeuble with a sinister labyrinthine underground car-park. Sunday 30: Nearest Metro to hotel is Nation: unfamiliar, vast and intimidatingly full of platforms for recently proliferated extension lines serving the banlieues. Investing in a carnet ...”

“... We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his novels after Voyage au bout de la nuit – the exclamation marks like spittle or gunfire, the ellipses forbidding us to catch our breath – to be reminded that Céline looks, and sounds, like no other novelist. In Normance the voice erupts at the highest decibels: ‘my voice! my ...”

“... tomb for CELESTES.’ The biggest aunt sally of the correspondence was undoubtedly General de Gaulle. For some time he was referred to in the correspondence as the Bride, since the allies were resolved to force him into a political marriage with General Giraud, the Groom. ‘The bride arrives here noon today,’ wrote Churchill to Roosevelt from ...”

“... another woman with a feather duster and an expression of unutterable boredom; and a voluble young man with mad eyes who conducts a tour. He shows us the drawing-room, the dining-room, the small bedroom where Pasternak died. A framed reproduction of his father’s portrait of Tolstoy hangs on the wall; on the bed lies a wilted bouquet of flowers, a reminder of ...”