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“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty ...”

“... surface. An enormous dried sunflower is attached, inverted, in the centre of the canvas. Peter Schjeldahl saw an ‘energetic contradiction of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival ...”

“... was not like this, however. It consisted of people who had lived as Christians in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Belgium. Some had studied at higher educational institutions, and knew about the science, philosophy and theology taught in them. They tried to keep up their Iberian heritage by training students in similar subjects, and ran Spanish poetry ...”

“... as could be, and from 1922 to 1940, when she and her family were émigrés in Czechoslovakia and France, she wrote to earn money in the émigré journals produced in Berlin, Prague and Paris. The general effect, however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy ...”

“... to Sartre and Gramsci, that Anderson was drawn. Assuming with Gramsci that the history of France was the norm, all else deviation, and distanced from his Englishness by an Anglo-Irish descent, the echoes of a Chinese childhood, an astonishing command of European languages, and a distaste for national sentiment, he was led initially to argue that what ...”

“... In The Long Dusk, Victor Serge’s novel about the fall of France, his alter ego Dr Ardatov escapes death just as the author did, on a boat out of Marseille in 1941. One of Ardatov’s companions, a much younger woman, Hilda, joins him on deck. She says something intense, he counters with something pompous. With a familiar irritation, she thinks: ‘I wish you were thirty years younger ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... on, he notes approvingly that his hero Victor Serge shared a house with Breton in the South of France as they both fled the Nazis, explaining that the two writers were working together in the French section of the anti-Stalinist International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists. Hoberman’s provocative, entertaining and informative book veers ...”

“... of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus detectable in ...”

“... boundaries themselves help to stimulate national consciousness in the majority; Britain, France, Spain may all be examples of this. A fact brought out by Hodgkin is that the minorities were not always on bad terms with the Vietnamese people, but repeatedly took part with them in risings against oppressive governments – as subject tribes in the ...”

“... of three referendums which challenged the grand designs of Brussels have been ignored – in France and the Netherlands in 2005, in Greece in 2015 – and three have led to a second vote: Denmark in 1993; Ireland in 2002 and 2009.) Mediapart likes to stress the undemocratic nature of the EU: ‘stolen from its citizens’ by ‘the markets’, ‘finance ...”

“... rising in Polish Ukraine and a devastating Swedish invasion known as the Deluge. To the east, Peter the Great was transforming old Muscovy into an expanding Russian empire, concluding that the Commonwealth was blocking its way into Europe. It was Peter, backed by the ambitious Prussian kings, who founded the policy of ...”

“... as the Nihonjinron, literally the ‘theory of Japaneseness’. Nihonjinron is the subject of Peter Dale’s book, the style of which is marred somewhat by his own almost Nihonjinronish fondness for psycho-socio-anthropological jargon. He has interesting things to say, however. The intellectual quest for the essence of Japaneseness is a huge industry in ...”

“... At the end of Out of this World the main character recalls his first trip abroad, on a visit to France to mark the tenth anniversary of the Armistice in 1918. Flying home, he felt that he was being lifted ‘out of the age of mud ... into the age of air’. This childhood memory is being recalled in 1982, at the time of the Falklands War, and it seems quite ...”

“... have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of ...”