Search Results

“... Bien Phu (the Army was betrayed by the politicians) and a heated argument about whether Mendès-France was a Communist or a socialist, Willard’s host (played by Christian Marquand, an old actor friend of Brando’s and the director of Candy) gives an eloquent explanation of why they must stay in this place where they are not wanted, where their time is ...”

“... as numbers of votes became the crucial determinant of political power this was a fatal weakness. Peter Merkl’s computerised analysis of the autobiographies of 581 members of the Nazi Party shows anti-semitism to have been a much stronger motive for joining before 1923 than afterwards. What is more, it shows, not only that anti-semitism was subordinate to ...”

“... women became a primary subject of her art, and she often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely ...”

“... are now some 20,000 recognised refugees in Britain, 30,000 in Holland, five times that number in France and over a million in Germany. According to the Government’s proposals, benefits would be withheld from anyone who failed to apply for asylum immediately on arrival, and from those involved in the lengthy process of appealing a decision to deny them ...”

“... not only the improvement of biographical fact but the artistic shaping of it. No one would accuse Peter Gwyn, author of The King’s Cardinal, of confusing life with art. His intentions are too austere to risk that imputation. Although his important and very long book proclaims itself a ‘biography’ of Thomas Wolsey, it fulfils few of the expectations ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... commerce that it generated over the three centuries from 1200 to 1500, provide the themes for Peter Spufford’s splendid book. Spufford’s magisterial study Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (1988) laid the foundations for this larger project; it is the fruit of extensive further research, both in the archives and on the ground, following the routes ...”

“... Berkeley wondered in 1735 whether ‘credit be not the principal advantage that England hath over France ... [and] over every other country in Europe’.* The years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars present a little more of a problem. Britain was certainly the banker of the various coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet ...”

“... for their livelihood in retirement. Hence the massive demonstrations and strikes last year in France, Austria, Italy and Germany when changes to the system were proposed. In the UK the state pension has always been mean and, until recently, the sense of entitlement weak. In most other countries pensions are entrusted to a quasi-autonomous public body ...”

“... the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene’s womb, and that her child with Jesus connects the kings of France to the Royal House of David.Mary Magdalene appears by name in the gospels as a woman possessed by seven devils, which are driven out by Jesus. Pope Gregory the Great identified them as the seven deadly sins and conflated this Mary with the unnamed woman ...”

“... Artists’ Committee had called on him, he might well have chosen regimental service. He died in France in 1944, in his first tank battle. He is not a painter about which there is much to say, and his work isn’t such as to attract attention from historians. Yet Whistler’s kind of Rococo decoration is not a negligible aspect of English taste in the ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... naturally offering us ‘... and Germany’, Douglas Johnson doing the same for ‘... and France’, and Peter Clarke doing C’s Economic Ideas 1900-1930. WSC was wrong but not as rigidly wrong as the Treasury, which in 1930-31 was doing exactly what it would do again sixty years later, i.e. upholding the sublime ...”

“... on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus ...”

“... itself – Herron’s characters don’t get to travel much. In Spook Street (2017) River goes to France for the day, the first time in the series any of the slow horses leaves England (in Dead Lions, River got as far as the Cotswolds). In Joe Country they go to Wales. But mostly they don’t venture beyond the M25. (Real Tigers ends with a Wild West ...”