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“... period in her route to celebrity, according to Sassoon – the Gioconda was drawing the crowds in Paris, while Cecilia and Ginevra were languishing in private collections in Krakow and Liechtenstein. The myth of the Mona Lisa was born out of 19th-century Northern Europe’s fascination with the Italian Renaissance in general, and Leonardo in particular. It ...”

“... begin with, Dupin was not middle-class or merely wealthy. The illegitimate daughter of Samuel Bernard, a financier who helped to fund the War of the Spanish Succession under Louis XIV, she married Claude Dupin, one of the directors of the tax-collecting Ferme générale. The Dupins lived in a splendid mansion near the Palais Royal in ...”

“... provided Genet with the nearest thing to a family he ever had – his mother abandoned him in Paris and, raised as an orphan in the Morvan, he seems to have taken to thieving early on. What fascinates Genet about the place is not so much its obvious venal inefficiency as a penal institution (it eventually became the subject of a national scandal), but the ...”

“... land lies. Here is the Britain she has received from those who created it, whether it be Matthew Paris or Sylvia Plath. Like many novelists, she has an acute sense of association and she is able to come very close to the regional influences which formed – or deformed – certain talents. She understands what it is like for a writer to have to work in the ...”

“... It was not a preventive or defensive war, because they understood that ‘neither London, nor Paris, nor St Petersburg wants war.’ In Pogge von Strandmann’s words, ‘without the German drive to extend her hegemony a major war would not have started in Europe in 1914.’ So, ironically, after seventy years’ search through the archives of all the ...”

“... girl he knows exudes handfuls of corn from her breasts every month: could the learned gentlemen in Paris please comment. She is ‘sincere and virtuous’, he assures them. The historian unpins the sachet; the corn is still there, ‘as golden as on the first day; it scatters in a rain on the yellowing archive,’ writes Farge. ‘A brief sunburst. What if it ...”

“... once valued for something in addition to profit. She offers a brilliantly ambiguous quote from Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of LVMH (Moët, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Dior and more): ‘What I like is the idea of transforming creativity into profitability.’ Rampant profitability required a rethink. In the 1950s, 200,000 women wore ...”

“... of them perished in the Soviet campaign. It took all Alice’s ingenuity to prevent her elder son Bernard being called up. She was a German mother now, and the Führer had a special affection for the wombs of the nation. So she argued with the local recruiting officer that, as the best student in his class, he was too brainy to go to the Front. He agreed, and ...”

“... bonhomie he invites a select number of the adoring crowd to dinner in his own home, a huge Paris duplex laden with rare objects and hung with Goyas, Matisses and Warhols. Very late that same night after the famous guests are gone, there’s a small fire in the bedroom, an accident of bad wiring. The celebrated designer instantly cracks up; he is ...”

“... and moralistic. Twenty years after landing in Egypt, he began publishing his six-volume Paris: ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie (1869-75), a massive, Zolaesque account of the city, teeming with statistics and reportage, opinion and anecdote. In the third volume (1872), his chapter on the guillotine is immediately followed by one on ...”

“... in uniform he was made to feel ‘rather like a Nazi officer must have felt walking along a Paris boulevard’. This added to Britain’s difficulties. It would have to rely on men like Stokes to stand any chance of holding on to the empire. But very few ordinary British soldiers had much enthusiasm for fighting wars in other people’s ...”

“... he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long as he remained in Trieste or Zurich or Paris he was able to take the part of maestro, conducting the chorus of voices in the parlour of the grandest house they had once lived in – 23 Castlewood Avenue, off Belgrave Square, Rathmines – or in the back kitchen of some much more modest ...”

“... the Limousin to meet Deleuze for the first time. He had grown up in La Garenne-Colombes, outside Paris, where his father ran a chocolate factory. By the age of 15 he was going to Communist Party meetings and selling copies of L’Humanité. Within three years he’d joined the Trotskyist opposition. While studying for a degree in pharmacology, he made ...”

“... her later pronouncement – after the Brownings had finally met Sand, at Elizabeth’s urging, in Paris – that the novelist was ‘a noble woman, under the mud’, and that the cigarette was ‘really a feminine weapon if properly understood’. Perhaps wisely, she does not expand on the proper understanding of cigarettes. Her experience in directing the ...”

“... of the 19th century. Lotto was re-created as a Renaissance neurotic in the likeness of the age by Bernard Berenson, who wrote a book about him in 1895. (‘I happen to have a temperament,’ Berenson grandly wrote, ‘which inclines me to forgive much in an artist like Lotto.’) Since then he has often had the dubious honour of being considered one of the ...”