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“... the victim, and was roughly proportional to the surface area of the body. The pressure at which a man had a 50-50 chance of being killed turned out to be 500 lb per square inch, ten times higher than previously thought. Zuckerman and his unit then began to look at injuries from high-velocity weapons and shrapnel fragments. These, too, presented puzzles. One ...”

“... over the portico; and, on 4 April 1791, the body of the first officially recognised Great Man of the new order, the first hero of the Revolution, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, made its way through throngs of the Great Man’s fellow citizens to the national shrine ...”

“... Saunière was an agent for some group. This story, the subject of a paperback in France by Gérard de Sède and of a Chronicle film for BBC Television by Henry Lincoln, is the starting-point of the present book. In their investigation of the problems posed by the story, Lincoln and his co-authors begin with the Cathars, and the Cathars lead to the Templars ...”

“... but seeing them move apart suddenly, as though the ground were splitting open.’ In Open Sky Paul Virilio cites this experience to secure an abstruse point about ‘the fractal nature of vision that results from high-speed adaptation’, but it also helps him connect, with typically swift insouciance, some of the leading themes of his ...”

“... objected to the breadth of his canvas. Give us back the tidy Reformation we used to know about, Paul Johnson complained, something which began in 1517 and ended with the Council of Trent in 1563. This misses the point by several miles. Only by taking the story far into the 17th century can MacCulloch plot the line and plumb the depth of the greatest ...”

“... influence of Durkheim with its special emphasis on structures. Both Raymond Aron and more recently Paul Veyne admit the influence of the sociological methods of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber in underscoring the specificity of historical events. In De la Connaissance Historique H.-I. Marrou attacks the narrow concept of what ...”

“... in one attractive volume. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival an American film, Mishima, by Paul Schrader caused considerable controversy; and in the spring I saw in Paris Jean-Louis Barrault’s company performing Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays, beautifully translated by Marguerite Yourcenar and directed with iconoclastic verve by Maurice Béjart. I ...”

“... leaving them with ‘in name a democracy, but in reality a government in the hands of the first man’. One presumes Giscard knows this, unless the preamble to his preamble was chosen by some exhausted functionary from the dictionary of useful quotations for occasions when jokes are not required. But then again, as, on this occasion, jokes were not ...”

“... from the outside: Walter and Patty, the pioneering gentrifiers of a once down-at-heel street in St Paul, Minnesota, are popular, liberal, but not quite knowable. Their teenage daughter, Jessica, is straightforward; their handsome teenage son, Joey, excessively doted on by his mother, is perversely attracted to the Monaghans, the working-class Republicans next ...”

“... of Pure Reason as encompassing all the interests of his reason, were also those which Jean-Paul Sartre pursued throughout his life, however different he intended his answers to be from those of Kant. Few thinkers in our time have pressed these questions with Sartre’s perseverence and imagination: but his subtle exploration of the first question ...”

“... novelist Alfred Döblin likened the ruins of the Tietz Palace, a Berlin department store, to ‘a man whose neck has been snapped with one blow, whose skull has been driven down onto his chest’. The flattened cities made onlookers think of natural disasters: Dagerman found Germany ‘drearier than the desert, wilder than a mountain-top and as far-fetched as ...”

“... lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (1897-1962); Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968), the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and stylesetter Madge Garland ...”

“... neglected her only daughter, born in 1913, when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with Colette? Lydia Davis suggests it might be, in her ...”

“... Coetzee, one of the bombers of the Worcester Shopping Mall in 1996, who came across as a wrecked man. Four people died in Worcester and 67 were injured, many of them seriously. Coetzee had been a member of the white Afrikaans Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) and an admirer of Wit Wolf Barend Strydom, who in 1988 massacred seven black people ...”

“... Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were queer women. ‘Miss Barney’s circle was not ...”