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“... mother, prompting strong feelings of guilt in the young man. On his release in 1927 he joined the French Foreign Legion, and during the Second World War is said to have expiated his crime by saving Jews in Marseille from deportation to Auschwitz. Police inquiries soon established that the three young men were part of a much wider conspiracy involving others ...”

“... to explore the ways in which consciousness multiplies itself. Normal and indeed fascinating. Both Karl Miller and Jeremy Hawthorn consider as one of their classic texts Conrad’s short story ‘The Secret Sharer’. Suggested by the concealment of a fugitive which actually took place on board the clipper ship Cutty Sark, the tale is of a young mate accused ...”

“... of Bravery, it has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick. Yet in this matter as in others the English are not as tolerant as they would like to be thought. Marxist blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The ...”

“... ruled themselves with out. They even dispensed with an army and navy strong enough to fight the French all over India and Canada. The next British improvement would have to be an extension of democracy, or so Burns, Blake. Shelley, Byron, Keats, the early Coleridge and Wordsworth thought. They welcomed the ...”

“... do not come from sociologists of science, post-structuralist literary critics, feminist theorists, French philosophers or any of the other varied targets of ‘science wars’ criticism. They actually come from scientists: Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ...”

“... and there were not only substantial numbers of Polish speakers in the east but pockets where French, Dutch, Lithuanian or Russian was the native tongue. Like other German states after 1815, only more so, Prussia faced a daunting task of state-building. Undertaken against a background of social, political and religious conflicts that efforts at ...”

“... Mach. We’re left wondering whether Adler, who assassinated the Austrian ‘minister-president’ Karl von Stürgkh in Vienna in 1916, aged more quickly during his brief jail term than Einstein, who was rocketing round the German science academies at the time. In the middle of the gallery an imposing contraption raises and lowers embossed catflaps on wooden ...”

“... and reflected gloomily on its – to them inevitable – failure. As recently as 2003, the eminent French historian Jacques Le Goff dismissed Charlemagne’s empire as an ‘anti-Europe’, created by brute force against the will of its inhabitants, and against the spirit of natural European diversity. Le Goff even ventured a comparison of Charlemagne with ...”

“... an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for him. The French ambassador to the Holy See, the duc d’Harcourt, remained alone in the chamber for 45 minutes, speaking in a loud voice so that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met ...”

“... after delivering him back at his flat I found that, even before I got home, I had started to cry. Karl Miller writes: A few weeks ago I visited Frank in Cambridge. I had known him for 52 years, and for much of that time I had been his editor, publishing him first in 1958, when he was a lecturer at Reading University. In a style of the period, I was warned ...”

“... canon is what gets taught.’ And I have the sense that Sarraute is no longer widely taught in French departments in the US. (The situation may well be different in other countries, not least in France.) A highly unscientific poll among colleagues confirmed my hunch. Nobody had seen her name on doctoral students’ reading lists since the mid-1990s. Some ...”

“... the pursuit of knowledge. I was surprised to learn that in 1915 it was accepted wisdom that the French invented, while the Germans and British turned their inventions to profit: many of my contemporaries in the Cavendish had to go to America in order to find someone interested in turning their inventions to profit. I wonder what killed the British spirit of ...”

“... Fama​ is a fickle goddess. In the early decades of the 20th century the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work ...”

“... chance of survival lay in the impossibility of reading everything he’d written. But no other French poet has had such influence: unlike Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Hugo affected more or less every poet who came after him. He threw out so many novelties he could hardly keep up with himself. A reader of any of the new selections will not only discover a way ...”

“... already has, and what is more, pursuing the controversy over the possible threat of cycling to the French birth-rate, has looked at Dr Ludovic O’Follo-well’s Bicyclette et organes génitaux (1900) as well. So dedicated an amassing of information, however choice some of the titbits, could have made a dull book. In fact, there is seldom a dull page, because ...”