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“... eaten and you’re not doing enough coke.’ This earned Dustan a degree of notoriety in France, even though his books never sold more than a few thousand copies. In the early 2000s, he would often appear on late-night television shows in a leather jacket and neon wig to hold forth about Jean Genet (overwritten), incest (occasionally positive) and ...”

“... took up the challenge thrown down by conservative reaction to the Revolutionary events in France. Bage, though, maintains a healthy distance from both the extreme optimism Godwin expressed in Political Justice (1793) and the profound pessimism of Caleb Williams (1794). And he did not share in the enthusiasm for war expressed on all sides as England ...”

“... record of ‘an incurable political animal’ in uniform. The progressive subaltern was sent to France, by mistake, two days after D-Day and taken prisoner by mistake, which enabled him to do a lot of reading. After VE-Day, while still an officer, he canvassed for the Communist candidate in Westminster. Then he found himself on a draft to India faced with ...”

“... feminine nom de plume to avoid military censorship, and that he lives ‘in exile’ in southern France. The impression given is that Khadra is a dissident, rather than a staunch defender of the Algerian army, an institution that bears considerable responsibility for the country’s descent into war. Khadra is a talented writer, but he isn’t a ...”

“... as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since ...”

“... history, and the prejudices of the past. Certainly they ought no longer to be performed. Although Linda Bamber is also unconvinced by the idea that Shakespeare should be considered a feminist writer, her approach in Comic Women, Tragic Men is far more reasonable than Jardine’s, and also genuinely responsive to the plays. Shakespeare, she argues, invariably ...”

“... your clothes!’ Younger reader, I read no more. Or at least no more Kundera. He had settled in France, where he went into exile in 1975, taken French citizenship, resolutely cultivated his privacy (odd for such an alert and opinionated and interesting man, a one-man talk-show in another world: ‘A Word in Edgeways’, as it might be, ‘with Milan ...”

“... ashamed. Ashamed in front of my children, that their father should be writing about that.’ All France’s crime reporters were at the trial. ‘It’s not every day you get to see the face of the Devil,’ Le Monde remarked. Catching sight of the strained faces of Florence Romand’s family, Carrère realises he is parti pris for the accused: ‘It was to ...”

“... Saint-Exupéry, the survivor of several crash landings, disappeared on a flight from Sardinia to France in 1944, having dedicated Wind, Sand and Stars ‘to the airline pilots of America and their dead’. Even Concorde was hastened to its end, after a 25-year blemish-free record, by the Paris crash in July 2000 that killed all 109 people on board. The ...”

“... plummet, so that by mid-century her work was selling for around a fiftieth of its former value. In France, her achievements were quickly eclipsed by the avant-garde, who cringed at the animalier genre of painting in which she specialised; even in her beloved Fontainebleau, the bronze bull erected to her memory was melted down by the Nazis and never ...”

“... but divided in his national identity and allegiance, for, despite being passionately committed to France, he was granted French citizenship only after two years of war service, and two years before his death at the age of 38 of Spanish influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger ...”

“... in Boots’, ‘The White Cat’ – that were being retrieved and written down in France by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy in the 1690s. D’Aulnoy did, however, claim that her inspiration came to her from ‘une vieille esclave arabe’.So the story of The Arabian Nights is a story of complex attention, formed by different historical and ...”

“... are ill-informed and who lack adequate knowledge is to prevent them having more information. In France, by the way, a list of the projects approved by the Cabinet is routinely issued to the press the day after each meeting – and such a practice is normal in many other countries too. Once again, the whole Army’s out of step with our Johnny. In 1981 the ...”

“... the Monadhliath Mountains’). Sometimes it’s like watching television coverage of the Tour de France, where you find yourself enjoying the landscapes and forgetting the pain and risk of the endeavour. Duffy’s narrative strangely combines certain topography and geology with uncertain politics and geopolitics. We hear nothing about the War of the Austrian ...”

“... modern category, the national chartered trading company, with counterparts in the Netherlands, France and Denmark, but the Crown also gave it the legal right to sign treaties and wage ‘defensive’ wars, as well as build fortified settlements. Over the second half of the 18th century, the Company created a sizeable territorial state, first in eastern and ...”