Search Results

“... English writers (like Gerald Brenan) and Spain, between old-fashioned American scholars and the French poets, and between flattering Frenchmen (like André Maurois) and the bluff English. I revere Nikolaus Pevsner, but he will have to forgive me if I detect a touch of flirtatiousness in The Englishness of Art. One could labour the point, and offer reasons ...”

“... the American actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell as the central Henderson brothers, the French Aurore Clément and the German Nastassia Kinski as their wives. For Wenders, a long-time lover of the Western and of American rock music, it was, as he has since told the French magazine Positif, the closing of a ...”

“... last Capetian King of France, which opened the way for Edward III, 12 years later, to claim the French throne as a better heir in blood than Philip VI, who succeeded; Philip’s confiscation of Edward’s French duchy of Aquitaine in 1337, which ...”

“... Sittow, who came from Reval (now Tallinn in Estonia) and had been trained in Bruges. Again, when Philip II wanted his new monastery-palace of the Escorial decorated, he summoned whole teams of painters from Italy, one group in the 1560s, and another, more distinguished, in the 1580s (the latter group included Luca Cambiaso, Federico Zuccaro and Pellegrino ...”

“... written in collaboration with a ‘plain’ historian, John Elliott, studied the court of Philip IV and the building of the Palace of the Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid. Behind the enterprise loomed the massive figure of Philip’s first minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Olivares took it seriously enough ...”

“... Proust wrote too many letters: he thought so and so anyone might think, as Philip Kolb’s expanding series of annual volumes edges towards the writer’s death, in 1922. Sheer numbers would not have mattered had they been stronger letters, but Proust’s correspondence is too much of it mechanical or emptily ingratiating, the one remaining exercise of the social virtues by a man who had taken to his bedroom (with occasional querulous sorties late at night to the Ritz Hotel) in order to be alone with his asthma and the prodigiously radiating manuscript of his novel ...”

“... and Thirties, he is right, in that this bonanza inspired a host of emulators. Pirate tales and French Revolution escapades proliferated. But surely there were plenty of able practitioners whose careers overlapped the early years of Sabatini’s, notably Weyman, Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The ...”

“... say, The Conquest of Water is mainly about France, and the perspectives throughout are indubitably French. Britain and the United States appear from time to time, sometimes as influences, more often as subjects of brief comparison. There are even more cursory references to Italy and to Germany, and a few to Third World countries, where water is often not ...”

“... with a country beyond the sea, or rather a dynasty beyond the sea. She married Charles’s son Philip, and once she was married she was desperate to secure a Catholic future by having his child. That child might with the right quirks of genealogy have ruled half the known world, and a good deal of it not then known: an empire combining Spanish and ...”

“... would otherwise have kept on the far side of the Atlantic? After the INF agreement the British and French Governments talked about developing an air launched cruise missile to extend the range of Mirage and Tornado aircraft. But such a weapon would very probably have been funded even without the disappearance of cruise and Pershing missiles. Warsaw Pact ...”

“... army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French initiated nothing, but reacted to German moves. As for British attitudes towards Germany, it is emblematic of their ambiguity that for all the indications of ‘antagonism’, the Kaiser in 1907 (in contrast to Mrs Thatcher in 1985) was awarded an honorary ...”

“... placid and amiable of all artistic schools – those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general – may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground. There have been hints, of course – but ...”

“... to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do so. C. P. Snow, however, knew that Philip would write this book ‘and welcomed it; his ...”

“... The last, by the Canadian George Cassar, appeared as recently as 1977. Before that there was Philip Magnus’s in 1958 and one by General Ballard in 1930, in addition to the three-volume official life published by his former private secretary, Sir George Arthur, in 1920, a host of shorter studies and several investigations into the circumstances of his ...”

“... a heap of other bodies down the monumental staircase of the Grand Circle’). He reads Russian, French, German, English, American, Spanish and Japanese books – fiction, philosophy, politics, poetry, history, anthropology ... He sketches his uncle, the writer General Butovsky, in a pair of spliced punchlines. In daily life, he was extraordinarily ...”