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“... what?” ... Zola with a patronising hein mon bon ... Degas with a loud dites quoi?’ Jacques-Emile Blanche compared him to a cavalry major on the drill ground: ‘If he makes a gesture it is imperious, expressive, like his drawing. But he soon adopts a defensive position, like a woman hiding her nakedness.’ Estrangements, the most painful those ...”

“... culture was already on the course that would set the human viewpoint in apposition to the divine. Roger Bacon, writing about optics in the 1270s, interpreted Alhazen’s mental images as if he meant actual pictures, and the principle that perceptions might resemble paintings would soon be demonstrated in reverse by Giotto, with his new effects of trompe ...”

“... a team of contributors that included Alain-Fournier, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry. Gide then proposed that they branch out into publishing ‘beautiful books’. Neither he nor his colleagues had the means to run a publishing house, but their friend Gallimard had time on his hands and plenty ...”

“... to Surrealists who rebelled against their controlling impresario, André Breton: Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural ...”

“... after he has dug his grave, refusing to move into the immaterial. Concerning Vesalius’ series, Roger Caillois remarked in his essay ‘Au coeur du Fantastique’ that ‘more genuine mystery crops up in such documents, in which precision is of the essence, than in the wildest inventions of Hieronymus Bosch.’ In the dissection groups, imagination was ...”

“... Almost immediately we are off on the chase for the fifth man (Rees?) and perhaps even a sixth (Sir Roger Hollis?). It may make good copy, but all these men save Philby have been dead for some time and we cannot continue hunting the moles of the 1930s and 1940s for ever without a complete loss of perspective about today’s vastly different intelligence ...”

“... Chandler, the novel draws on 1940s film noir (the narrative flashback in Otto Preminger’s Laura, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, the recorded confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity). There’s also a nod to Camus’s self-confessing narrator in The Fall. In the context of the French crime novel, however, it appeared wildly original. Instead of ...”

“... to try to read it, those who have tried and failed, and … those who write about it’. Roger Marsh, the producer of Jim Norton’s and Marcella Riordan’s haunting audio version, names ‘new readers’, ‘readers who have never been able to make much headway’ and ‘those who already have some familiarity with the book’. For good ...”

“... be trusted. Virtually all Western governments had been penetrated at the highest level, he said. Jacques Foccart, De Gaulle’s legendary spy chief, was actually the French Philby and there was a whole network of spies (‘the Sapphire network’) within the French Government. A huge and inconclusive hunt was conducted. Then Golitsyn announced the existence ...”

“... or an idealistic ecologist, are constantly denounced – see, for example, the recent book by Jean-Jacques Brochier, Vive la chasse! Woe betide any would-be local politician who does not allow his fellow citizens to shoot on his land. So ingrained is the belief in the right to shoot that the story is told of the instituteur who sent his pupils home one ...”

“... prejudices – ‘those horrible Frenchmen you posted me. I did go through the first one . . . Jacques Nerrida [sic] . . . they seem to me so very disgusting’ – but he doesn’t trade confidences, at least in the letters Haffenden has selected. There is not even any real news about his own poems. Haffenden is surely right to have been tactful, if ...”

“... Vercors (Jean Bruller) and Thimerais (Léon Motchane), anti-fascist exiles including the publisher Jacques Schiffrin and the writer Nicola Chiaromonte, and US army veterans brandishing copies of Combat that they’d picked up in France. The title of his talk – later published in Vogue – was ‘The Crisis of Man’. Camus had been asked to speak about the ...”

“... justification of popular revolt to a group of Parisian nominalists of whom the most radical was Jacques Almain, the most significant John Mair (1467-1550) – a Scot who taught Knox and Buchanan long before the Protestant Reformation. John Pocock is so dazzling in ‘Authority and Property: the Question of Liberal Origins’ that one has to rub one’s eyes ...”

“... or lingered on in different ways for different people. A couple of years earlier, in a letter to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Simone de Beauvoir had pronounced it ‘less and less likely’ that Hitler could want a war. Now she took the news that the summer examinations of 1940 had been cancelled to be ‘definitive and without hope’. St Exupéry’s friend Léon ...”

“... centuries, such as the defecating duck and the life-sized musicians made by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson. These automata embody the era’s materialist and mechanistic philosophies, inspiring thinkers like Descartes and Leibniz and finding easy coherence with our own robot-building. But how were such machines perceived before the ...”