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“... write about film first (under the name, Hans Lucas) for the tiny Gazette du Cinéma and then for France’s premier film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, where his colleagues included Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer. During this time he travelled to America and Brazil and (like Truffaut) committed a number of petty thefts – from friends, family, employers – and ...”

“... art and architecture, in particular the Gothic and the landscape garden, had many admirers in France and Germany. Napoleon himself ordered Gothic furnishings from London. In the years after Waterloo it was inevitable that cultural tourists should flock to Britain to see at first hand what they had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance ...”

“... scandal), but the fact that the reformatory was part of one of the most celebrated cathedrals of France, the Abbey of Fontevrault. Under a law of the Revolution, various charches were designated as penal institutions, and men in blue overalls can still be seen today cutting grass and wheeling barrows in the shadow of the spires and gargoyles tourists travel ...”

“... VIII, ‘He has the secret of youth in the prime of age,’ whereas Ernest Simpson just called him Peter Pan.) In contributing The Duchess of Windsor, Diana Mosley has set herself a harder task than most. Her aims are good or at least interesting; their realisation was impossible. There is bound to be an element of moral judgment in any account of the ...”

“... in the Western Desert and by spring he was back in action. On 9 June, three days after landing in France, he was killed behind enemy lines. We can trace the beast to a passage in From Alamein to Zem Zem, in which he describes his escape from a blasted tank over a minefield of wrecked armour and oil-stained corpses: Presently I saw two men crawling on the ...”

“... was either downplayed or seen as a justifiable punishment. Ten million Germans suffered in what Peter Gatrell describes as ‘a reckoning on a grand and terrible scale’: 2.7 million were expelled from the Sudetenland and other parts of Czechoslovakia; six million were driven out of Poland and hundreds of thousands from Yugoslavia, Hungary and ...”

“... ideologies, and there’s a problem when they don’t. What, then, do we really want from them? Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void offers some disturbing answers to this question. We remain in the dark about the strategies Mair might have recommended to address the crisis of Western democracy – he died of a heart attack in 2011 before his book was finished ...”

“... or Paris, and some who vanish into history. We hopscotch between New York, San Francisco, Mexico, France, Morocco, India; we ricochet from Bombay to Delhi to Calcutta and Benares, with visits to sundry ashrams and temples in between: in Pondicherry, Tiruvannamalai, Mathura, Jaipur, Dharamsala. First we’re in 1962, then 1958, then 1948, then 1971. There’s ...”

“... do that, they’ll catch him.’ The narrator tells us later that before he went to France to fight he had ‘never shot at a bird or an animal in my life’ – so his first targets were humans. Sassoon’s attitude to blood sports, as to most other things, was not without its complexities. All I felt at that moment was extreme annoyance at the ...”

“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”

“... it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte blanche. The free-for-all continued, with neither local nor Parliamentary government overseeing London’s growth, until the setting up of the London ...”

“... and poverty – which ruled out the ambitious modernising colonialisms of industrial America, France, England and the Netherlands – and to its strategic position in Spain’s armpit, at the mouth of the Mediterranean, which earned it for centuries the backing of London’s naval might. It collapsed fastest because of the bizarre longevity of the ...”

“... but the year has seen translations of Politics in the Ancient World flamboyantly launched in France and Italy, where he was fêted by academics and the popular press in a manner normally reserved for politicians or pop stars. This brings the number of translations of Politics in the Ancient World to about ten, including one in Catalan. Full-page, sober ...”

“... What saves these poems (for poetry) is the discreet use of spoken words (as in the fine sonnet ‘France’: ‘I would have liked us to have gone away’ ... ‘Some other day, my love. Some other day’), and the sharply focused detail – like the doctor’s wedding ring in ‘Second Opinion’. But it is the formal grace, now become habitual, and the ...”

“... of a century of cults and gurus, of sincerity and fraudulence, of hopes and disappointments, Peter Washington detects the faint sound of Blavatsky’s baboon having the last laugh. Washington presents his subject as the rise of the Western guru: in fact, charisma, faith, leader and follower, have never been absent from religion or from history. In the ...”