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Behind the Gas Lamp

Julian Barnes: Félix Fénéon, 4 October 2007

Novels in Three Lines 
by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Sante.
NYRB, 171 pp., £7.99, August 2007, 978 1 59017 230 8
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... time, mellowed his judgment: in 1943 he told his friend and future literary executor, the critic Jean Paulhan, that it was ‘the least successful work painted by Signac’. Worse for Fénéon, it established a template of profilism. Bonnard, Vuillard and Vallotton all depicted him in more or less the same pose: leaning forwards – bent into a near ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... refuge while other politicians use it as a way of supporting their ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other ...

Laid Down by Ranke

Peter Ghosh: Defending history, 15 October 1998

In Defence of History 
by Richard J. Evans.
Granta, 320 pp., £8.99, October 1998, 1 86207 068 7
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... was a reactionary, and was often French. The troublesome nature of the term was compounded by Jean-François Lyotard’s near-simultaneous usage (and definition) in 1979-82 from within the French intellectual tradition, and as a critic of Habermas. It briefly acquired an ascertainable meaning in architectural style; but very rapidly ...

Diary

Charles Nicholl: At the Maison Rimbaud in Harar, 16 March 2000

... the house were surplus railway sleepers: this would date the construction to around 1902, when the Franco-Ethiopian railway first reached Dire Dawa, by which time Rimbaud would have been dead for 11 years. This has not deterred tourguides and sightseers, for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports ...

Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

Angela Carter, 24 January 1985

The Official Foodie Handbook 
by Ann Barr and Paul Levy.
Ebury, 144 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 85223 348 5
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An Omelette and a Glass of Wine 
by Elizabeth David.
Hale, 318 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 7090 2047 3
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Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook 
by Alice Waters, foreword by Jane Grigson .
Chatto, 340 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 7011 2820 8
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... and serving them up to the me-generation in a restaurant named after an old movie. The result is a Franco-Californian cuisine of almost ludicrous refinement, in which the simplest item is turned into an object of mystification. A ripe melon, for example, is sought for as if it were a piece of the True Cross. Ms Waters applauds herself on serving one. ‘Anyone ...

Waiting for Something Unexpected

Sophie Pinkham: Gaito Gazdanov, 6 March 2014

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf 
by Gaito Gazdanov, translated by Bryan Karetnyk.
Pushkin, 167 pp., £7.99, November 2013, 978 1 78227 072 0
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... plunges the narrator back into his memory of the war, suffers the same affliction, and so does Jean, the French police inspector. The narrator’s lover, Yelena, has a quick, lithe body, but her soul is sluggish. The characters are torn between past and present, choice and powerlessness, life and death. Very often the inner world prevails over the ...

Grail Trail

C.H. Roberts, 4 March 1982

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
Cape, 445 pp., £8.95, January 1982, 0 224 01735 7
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The Foreigner: A Search for the First-Century Jesus 
by Desmond Stewart.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 241 10686 9
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Satan: The Early Christian Tradition 
by Jeffrey Burton Russell.
Cornell, 258 pp., £14, November 1981, 0 8014 1267 6
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... glance at the list makes the authors’ initial scepticism intelligible enough. The first name is Jean de Gisons (1188-1220), the last Jean Cocteau; those listed are either aristocrats of the House of Lorraine (among whose ancestors are numbered Godfroi de Bouillon, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Merovingian kings) or ...

Say no more about the climate

Tom Crewe: Impressionists in/on London, 26 April 2018

Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904 
Tate Britain, until 7 May 2018Show More
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... and appreciate. But this isn’t a painting. It’s a photograph taken in 1870, a document of the Franco-Prussian War. Look again and you notice that the bridge itself is missing, destroyed by the conquering Prussian army; its suspension cables dangle in the air. The men who might have made this picture had different priorities. Earlier in the ...

Head over heart for Europe

Peter Pulzer, 21 March 1991

Ever Closer Union: Britain’s Destiny in Europe 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hutchinson, 96 pp., £7.99, January 1991, 0 09 174908 5
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The Challenge of Europe: Can Britain win? 
by Michael Heseltine.
Pan, 226 pp., £5.99, February 1991, 9780330314367
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... war. What heroes has the Continent produced in our century? Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. Beside them those who did quiet good, like Tomas Masaryk or Henri Dunant, shone rather palely. Europe did not seem to be setting attractive political examples or pointing in desirable directions. Britain’s reluctance in 1945 to be involved with a ...

Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua

Michael Sheringham: The French Provinces, 31 July 2008

The Discovery of France 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 454 pp., £9.99, July 2008, 978 0 330 42761 6
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... or an idleness attuned to ‘the rhythm of life’. The life-story of a Breton peasant called Jean-Marie Déguignet, who ‘wrote his memoirs because he had never read about anyone like himself’, involves hunger, fire, war and a blow to the head from a horse’s hoof.* But where even a perceptive traveller like the English farmer Arthur Young would have ...

Bebop

Andrew O’Hagan, 5 October 1995

Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-56 
edited by Ann Charters.
Viking, 629 pp., £25, August 1995, 0 670 84952 9
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... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, that little football scholarship guy from Lowell, Massachusetts, had wanted his name on the wall too. Yes he did. A few years after his appearance on the Steve Allen Show, Kerouac’s name turned up on the bathroom wall of the White ...

Desire Was Everywhere

Adam Shatz, 16 December 2010

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives 
by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman.
Columbia, 651 pp., £26, August 2010, 978 0 231 14560 2
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... which life at La Borde presented. His soixante-huitard friends (La Borde’s director, Jean Oury, called them ‘the barbarians’) staged regular invasions of the clinic. During the day, there were performances in the courtyard: a Japanese mime troupe, a Maoist magician, sometimes the patients themselves – on Bastille Day, they dressed up as ...

Europe’s Sullen Child

Jan-Werner Müller: Breurope, 2 June 2016

... expense of further integration. Having Eastern Europe in meant that the possibility of permanent Franco-German domination was out. During these years of effective ‘UK-ification’ of the EU, Britain gained allies across the continent. Eastern Europeans were grateful for its steadfast support of enlargement. Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands – all ...

Gaelic Gloom

Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist 
by Denis Sampson.
Marino, 344 pp., IR£20, October 1998, 1 86023 078 4
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... the early years of the war and his family’s conservatism. Gavin’s mother thinks that General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and ...

La Grande Sartreuse

Douglas Johnson, 15 October 1981

Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment 
by Anne Whitmarsh.
Cambridge, 212 pp., £14.50, June 1981, 9780521236690
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Un Fils Rebelle 
by Olivier Todd.
Grasset, 293 pp., £5.50, June 1981, 2 246 21231 6
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The Intellectual Resistance in Europe 
by James Wilkinson.
Harvard, 358 pp., £14, July 1981, 0 674 45775 7
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... with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone de Beauvoir is important only because of her association with Sartre. Her four volumes of autobiography are sometimes seen merely as useful source ...

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