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“... When he arrived​ at the meditation retreat, a little south of Paris, Emmanuel Carrère was warned that he would be working with powerful psychic energies. ‘If for some reason you decide to leave mid-session,’ he and the fifty other men present were told, ‘you’ll throw the others off, and above all you’ll put yourself in danger ...”

“... than snapshots of the sitter as physically captured in a precise historical moment’. Bruce Bernard, who knew Freud from adolescence, also described the portraits as ‘prophetic’. ‘In the past,’ Blackwood wrote in 1993, ‘this was not so obvious because his prophecies had not yet become so dire and grim. When I used to sit for him nearly forty ...”

“... Throughout the Sixties rumours circulated in Paris political circles about the awesome powers of de Gaulle’s adviser, Jacques Foccart. Foccart had no elected position and was seldom seen, but he was said to have an exclusive hold over France’s African policy, the intelligence services and the whole shadowy world of covert action ...”

“... Can passion be stronger than power? Do we want it to be? Imagine now the Palais de Justice in Paris in February 1898. Emile Zola has been charged with libelling the army in his famous letter, which we know today under the title ‘J’accuse’ (it was a stroke of genius of the editor of L’Aurore, the left-wing paper in which it appeared, to splay these ...”

“... down over their heads’ – through a dreamlike pause for coffee and bread, and then on to Paris in pursuit of their luggage, the heroine breathlessly recounts the story of the couple’s first days and nights on the Continent. This short tale, in a longer letter, has its climax when a brief note from Robert summons the Brownings’ mutual friend and ...”

“... tells his sister, Eve, at the start of a long letter home listing his difficulties. Having come to Paris to seek love and fame he has found neither. He is broke and has had to take a furnished room in the Hôtel de Cluny, a derelict medieval house in one of the ‘dingiest roads in Paris’. The building is ‘squashed in ...”

“... on the reactionaries’ activities, sending letters in code and invisible ink to Man’s aunt in Paris.In California, these refugees live the quiet, scattered lives of immigrants. The General opens a liquor store. The narrator and Bon move into an apartment together; Bon goes on welfare; the narrator works in the department of Oriental studies at Occidental ...”

“... some of his grands projets have their positive side. I can’t see what the Grande Arche does for Paris, but the Pyramide du Louvre is a plus. And the Bibliothèque de France, thanks to which I became (rather briefly) his personal enemy, is a genuinely good thing. Of course, Mitterrand cares nothing for scholarship, readers and professors (though he affects ...”

“... is being nudged into the cultural limelight, this time by clash-of-civilisations warriors such as Bernard Lewis, who proclaim curiosity to be the distinguishing feature of the West, in woeful contrast to the alleged indifference of Muslim societies to other ways of life. If the battle is to be joined for a second time, it would be helpful to know how it came ...”

“... But if one shows fictional elements in ‘Such, such were the joys’, or in Down and Out in Paris and London, is one to be accused of doubting the word of ‘the crystal spirit’, of destroying his reputation for integrity and honesty, or is one paying tribute to a craftsman less naive than some of the Chelsea and Bloomsbury literary friends of the ...”

“... were yelping for all-out combat: peace with his brother-in-law Louis IX under the Treaty of Paris, peace with Llywelyn in Wales, with another brother-in-law, Alexander II in Scotland. The only man with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a ...”

“... seat was in Corrèze, several hours and cultures away from his native Rouen and the party HQ in Paris. An affable man, a football fan (celebrity and populism) in a rugby union environment (grit and regionalism), Hollande would leave the capital on Thursdays for his constituency and return, ready for action on Monday, as head of the party. He was a ...”

“... Fortunately, the text of The Middle East has not been written by the author of the captions. Bernard Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, is a fluent, lively, erudite and lucid writer. He also has an eye for the pointillist anecdote and pithy maxim culled from the primary sources. His book appears in a ‘History of ...”

“... sentimental and melodramatic performances at the popular theatre. The author of an 1870 guide to Paris amused himself by informing readers about the weeping natives who still inhabited some quarters of the city: In the middle of the 19th century there still exist primitive creatures moved to an incontinence of tears by the misfortune of a few heroines on ...”

“... great man,’ Nagel says, ‘does things on a large scale! He doesn’t just live in Paris, he occupies Paris.’ ‘I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses,’ the hero of Hamsun’s play At the Gates of ...”