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“... Most disturbing of all, perhaps, in a section about Auschwitz and the Vichy government: the French word ‘jamais’, ‘never’, becomes a German word followed by a French one – ‘Ja mais’, ‘yes but’. The context suggests that too many people were saying ‘ja’; had forgotten their ‘mais’. A shot of ...”

“... poorly-paid workers and the latest in steam-powered printing, Migne undid the effects of the French Revolution, reversed the Reformation, created ‘the two most beautiful historical monuments to be found anywhere in the world’ and directed ‘the greatest publishing enterprise since the invention of printing’. The abbé said as much himself in the ...”

“... yoked successively to four demanding Scandinavians. Bunche was a brilliant young professor at Howard University, making his name as an Africanist, when Gunnar Myrdal hired him to work on his Carnegie-funded study of race in America. Myrdal soon learned that his new collaborator would work hours no one else would and proceeded to extract from him some ...”

“... the Frenchness of his rhetoric. Thody’s very description of what he calls ‘a well-established French rhetorical tradition’ shows how far he is from its mood: ‘ideas are stated in what is sometimes rather an exaggerated form in order to produce more of an effect.’ ‘Sometimes’, ‘rather’ – the words mime a caution and a reasonableness the ...”

“... are mitigated for her by academic interests – hers in the Romantic tradition, her lover’s in French cathedrals. The novel is warm and delightful about donnish life, exhibiting its own kind of donnishness in a sentence like ‘The dog was very old, and did not seem particularly viable.’ But Kitty’s plight is to be half-...”

“... of his own power and prestige. For example, when he went to Sarajevo he thoroughly bamboozled French humanitarian workers, not to speak of the Bosnians and the world: they really did think he would help them. Sometimes he even used his power to good ends. He was a convinced European. He sincerely wanted the French and ...”

“... III was imminent. Regime change was apparently confirmed by the long-delayed arrival ” of French forces, landing near Dungeness two weeks later, after a squadron of ships from Brest had scattered Vernon’s weak British force. At least Charles’s magnanimity towards leading Whigs, and his promises of religious toleration, indicated that he wanted a ...”

“... dummy runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. That fits with Lucan’s remarks to Greville Howard some weeks before the murder that he planned to drop his wife’s body into the Solent. As for the Lucan ‘set’, once so besieged and worried for its survival, this has long since been amalgamated into the Thatcher revolution. It’s a pity that neither ...”

“... into the sarcophagus which had contained his remains for five centuries until Elton, as if playing Howard Carter in the Public Record Office, excitedly opened it in 1947. But most followed Elton in attributing credit, discredit and, generally, responsibility for what happened in Henry’s reign to others, the politicians, courtiers and prelates who either ...”

“... the Queen, which served ulterior purposes of entrapment and incrimination – in this case of the French Ambassador’s secretary, Des Trappes. Also involved in this sham plot was Michael Moody, a former servant of Sir Edward Stafford’s in France and from the late 1580s an associate of Robert Poley, the veteran spy who was one of the men present at ...”

“... about that system. All three were Francophone writers, drawing on their varied experiences of French colonialism. Mannoni had served in the colonial service in Madagascar; Fanon was born in a French colony, Martinique, and spent much of his adult life in French North Africa; Memmi was ...”

“... Shampoo, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Carrie, The Fury, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is writing, and talk as a form of writing. In The Cinema House and the World, Serge Daney, whose career at Cahiers du cinéma began in 1964, insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by ...”

“... practices that enact the figurative – and sometimes literal – decapitation of women. As Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, the volume’s co-editor and lone male contributor, puts it in his introduction, ‘if the head is typically thought of as masculine, then what is to be made of the female head? Our contention is that the objectification of woman as a ...”