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“... the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had moved permanently to France. Every inch of interior wall had been covered in murals by a young French painter, against which Lourié looked finally at home. He had been one of Akhmatova’s ‘husbands’ for a while. Tenuous communication had not diminished their emotional ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... secularisation of politics. Commenting on the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches, Peter Berger, doyen of Weberian theorists, was forced to admit that ‘serious intellectual difficulties’ had been created ‘for those (like myself) who thought that modernisation and secularisation were inexorably linked phenomena.’ Brushing aside the ...”

“... suffocating blanket of prudery had for nearly a century characterised ‘Victorian’ England – France, too, for that matter. Mason agrees that, as defined by Foucault, sex ‘was certainly not repressed in the English 19th century’. ‘In fact’, he adds, the point, ‘like much in Foucault, emerges as something of a platitude when expressed in a ...”

“... Victor Cousin enlisted him in his campaign against the extreme empiricism which surrounded him in France, and he enjoyed a vogue among the ‘Ontologists’ in Italy and Belgium. Sidgwick had a high regard for him, but he was always more popular in the United States than in England, being particularly admired by C.S. Peirce, and more recently by Roderick ...”

“... of view that combines the frustration of all those viewers (a billion watched the Final between France and Brazil last summer), and by reference to which Jones’s pleas for rescue can be reasonably rejected – or even be counted unreasonable. If, on the other hand, Jones could be rescued immediately only by a manoeuvre that would kill Smith, also pinned ...”

“... at a ball at Chudleigh. In August 1914 Archie, who had transferred to the RFC, was posted to France with his squadron. He returned to England on leave in December, and they were married by special licence on Christmas Eve. During the war Agatha worked first as a VAD, then as a dispenser in the hospital at Torquay. In September 1918 Archie was posted to ...”

“... be sure that only Jews were intended; surely a case could be made for not performing his work in France, or warning husbands not to listen, and so on. Yet Rose’s comparison of Beethoven and Wagner shouldn’t go unnoticed: four ounces of ennoblement in Beethoven as against two in Wagner. It’s like a drunk-driving test. And how, listening to Wagner, does ...”

“... Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. The strategy was foolish and hopeless. One major of the Gurkhas thought that ...”

“... a few well-known and intelligent social democrats – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, Peter Jenkins and Polly Toynbee – but they were still destroyed by the electoral system and had to stave off obscurity by a political transplant, merging with the Liberals, an experiment that ended in disaster in 2015. Were they to try the same, the Blairites ...”

“... in social issues, and he used sex in his writings as a way of describing power relations. As Peter Wagner demonstrated in Eros Revived (1988), politicised pornography was an 18th-century commonplace. Sade’s pornography, as one would expect from a man who so calamitously lacked the power to refrain, is boringly exaggerated. The interminable and ...”

“... China’ was about to rejoin the world. The Geneva Accords on Indochina, which ended France’s colonial wars in South-East Asia and partitioned Vietnam, had been a personal triumph for the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai. Urbane, amusing and fluent in their languages, Zhou charmed foreign diplomats and journalists off their feet. Perhaps, they began ...”

“... eyes, smiling the cheerful smile of the dead, Munditia still greets visitors to the Church of St Peter in her glass case. Since the late 17th century she has served as the patroness and protector of single, unmarried women. Her feast day, traditionally celebrated with great ceremony, falls on 17 November. Koudounaris describes the miraculous cures that the ...”

“... of fish and chips.’ (But it’s true: ‘rock salmon’ in Britain, or ‘saumonette’ in France, is spiny dogfish, once one of the most abundant shark species in the world and now critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic.) Personally, I’ll read pretty much any old rubbish about sharks and absolutely anything about shark attacks. We shark ...”

“... to Strasbourg, where they lived for five years. French was Ferlinghetti’s first language, and France was the culture to which, in later years, he aspired. On their return to the US, Emily placed her nephew in an orphanage in Chappaqua, a hamlet in northern Westchester County, New York. John Cheever territory. The sort of hallucinated commuter retreat ...”