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“... language of the computer has taken over at least in parody. In an article in the magazine Byte, Philip Schrodt, not clearly identified by Petroski, has described the pencil as a generic word-processor and the pencil point as ‘the character insertion sub-unit’. Petroski himself concludes, after a detailed study of how the pencil was perfected as a ...”

“... explained how ‘gloriously liberating’ he found the ‘scratch and sniff pictures’ of Philip Guston which ‘smelled of stale vodka and cigarettes, old spunk and dirty sheets’. Other artists were praised for shamelessly cocking their legs (De Chirico!) or for ‘drooling over fleshy naked women’ with a ‘quite shocking lack of ...”

“... dome filled with works of art connected with wine. During the war he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank ...”

“... chief aim, which was not to acquire a deep sociological knowledge of native life but to keep the French and the Russians out. Foliard’s notion that a coherent concept of the Middle East emerged through mapping in the early 20th century mixes together what were actually various separate processes. The first was the general increase in interest in ...”

“... Sciascia (Italy), Bernhard Schlink (Germany). What must be its mandarin masterpiece was written in French in 1969: Georges Perec’s La Disparition is a lipogram, from the Greek lipogrammatos (‘missing symbol’), denoting a text that excludes one or more letters. The letter ‘e’, which doesn’t appear once in its 300 pages, is understood to represent ...”

“... procession is seditious, menacing, propelled by a wild music – part carnivalesque, part dirge (Philip Miller is the composer) – and by the moves of a jubilant dancer, in silhouette like the rest of the troupe. Elsewhere in the piece, we’re asked to think about time as if it weren’t the thing we experience. That’s not easy: just as ideas about the ...”

“... progressivists, structuralists and deconstructionists. Reminding one of those early 20th-century French hard-liners who insisted on calling themselves Catholics sans epithète, Elton pleads for plain, unadorned history as he himself has practised it. As we learned from The Practice of History (1967), history for him is practice – doing, not theorising ...”

“... the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky. During his schooldays in Monaco he was known as Cointreau-Whisky, and his poetry includes characters with equally peculiar monikers – Rotsoge, Madame Salmajour, Monsieur ...”

“... Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, most of the antecedents he named were French, and he credited the ur-method of Surrealism to two compatriots, Isidore Ducasse (aka Lautréamont), whose line about ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’ was already talismanic, and Pierre Reverdy, who ...”

“... that of the intrepid multilingual translator Mireille Gansel. Working to translate poets into French, Gansel also touches on the mystical relation to the word as professed in Judaic thought. In Singed, a poetic essay on books lost in a fire, the writer Daniela Cascella has suggested the neat coinage ‘trancelation’, the state of self-dissolution some ...”

“... of European art. After Poussin, the loftiest of the city’s easel painters, died in 1665, the French would treat his legacy (and that of Claude, his fellow expat) as their own national property. And by 1680, when the long career of Bernini, Rome’s multimedia cultural supremo, came to an end, the appetite of the city’s churchmen and grandees for ...”

“... three major exhibitions, of books from the DDR, from the Soviet Union, and of books published in French in Hungary, to tie in with a visit Mitterrand is soon to make to Budapest. Book Week is a national event, started in 1929 and held annually towards the end of May. Streets, squares or marketplaces in Budapest and many provincial towns are closed off ...”

“... by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly musical. The next chapter concerns Chaalis, a Cistercian abbey north of Paris which was famous in the medieval period for its ...”

“... scalding, staplebound enemy of mixed metaphors, pan-Germanism, the House of Habsburg, everything French, pro-semites and anti-semites, and the popular press, especially Vienna’s paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. In 1899, the 24-year-old Kraus – the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer from Gitschin in Bohemia, now Jičín in the Czech Republic ...”

“... stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to Europeans’. In 1898, Baedeker simply told tourists that they ‘present an unpleasing exterior’. The ...”