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“... it was very dirty – was done by them. They unleashed volleys of arrows, slaughtered hundreds of French men-at-arms, and finished off both prisoners and the wounded who lay helpless. The legend of Agincourt has become so popular – in Britain at least – partly because it teaches that the common man can change the course of history. As W.B. Bartlett puts ...”

“... At the Paris Salon​ of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are sketching from a ringleted, clothed female model, concentrating on getting the folds of the drapery right ...”

“... was also described as a ‘free-born black’ from Martinique, an island on the other side of the French colonial empire. More immediately, he had come from Paris, where he had been put in the Châtelet prison and then, to his outrage, exiled to Ile de France by order of the Naval Minister. What he was supposed to have done to warrant this treatment is far ...”

“... with their ever expanding lists of secondary contributions as well as primary sources in Latin, French, Middle English, Dutch, Catalan and Portuguese. And all this done in Sumption’s spare time from his work as a barrister and then a justice of the UK Supreme Court. But what is the result? Was the Hundred Years War special in anything except its ...”

“... Last July David Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s alleged participation in acts of torture and rendition in the years since 9/11, though he also said that it wouldn’t begin until the current round of civil lawsuits had been resolved. The emphasis, he implied, would be on Britain’s role in condoning or assisting foreign agencies rather than on our own independent behaviour ...”

“... in New York in 1915. His father, Bennett Siegelstein, who had grown up (alongside Eddie Cantor and David Sarnoff) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was a prominent lawyer, as well as the founder and former chairman of the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged in Brooklyn. He had championed Romanian Jews, held seders, and sent the poor Jewish children of the ...”

“... a heap of other bodies down the monumental staircase of the Grand Circle’). He reads Russian, French, German, English, American, Spanish and Japanese books – fiction, philosophy, politics, poetry, history, anthropology ... He sketches his uncle, the writer General Butovsky, in a pair of spliced punchlines. In daily life, he was extraordinarily ...”

“... on Arshi Pipa’s 1987 translation. Kadare dropped a few passages and added some new ones in a French edition of 1997, however, and David Bellos has changed the English text accordingly, as well as making ‘stylistic amendments here and there where they seemed called for’. (Bellos’s judgment in matters of style is ...”

“... humanitarian operation’. Others were more inclined to see it as a calamity. Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is ...”

“... passes over Monsieur Conaire, who pursues Mercier and Camier to a hotel in Beckett’s first French novel. The cognates Muldoon finds for Beckett’s name are Old Irish and English, becc and boc, which sound like characters from one of the late plays. He neglects Beckett’s French Huguenot background, which the author ...”

“... khedive of Egypt, theoretically a subject ruler of the Ottoman Empire, invited the British and the French to set up a debt commission, staffed by European officials, with extensive quasi-sovereign powers to tax, spend and direct Egyptian revenue, and to supervise debt. European involvement in the Egyptian economy steadily increased: the American economist ...”

“... In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights ...”

“... pacifying Kandahar or pummelling Gaddafi is somehow essential to preserving their way of life. David Nichols has written a slight, narrowly focused book that provides modest but not inconsequential insight into the origins of America’s involvement in the Greater Middle East. His focus is the Suez Crisis, or more specifically, the way Eisenhower’s ...”

“... for dead. The last full-scale history of English literature that anybody has bothered over was David Daiches’s two-volume Critical History of English Literature. When it appeared, in 1960, it was thought gallant but defeated. For a successful history of English from a single pen, we must no doubt go back to Saintsbury, who is still readable. There is ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”