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“... Catholic churches were already too well established under the jealous patronage of Russia and France for Protestantism to have any impact. Cardinal Newman’s eccentric brother Francis – classicist, anti-vaxxer and pioneer vegetarian – was one of the many young idealists who failed to make a single convert in Syria. He returned home gloomily ...”

“... branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have cut the cake and what we would have called it if the Tudors had reigned, say, from 1450 to 1700. For Bindoff, it ...”

“... her introduction as an urbane, amusing character. This new translation by Gina Greco and Christine Rose is the first to appear in English of the whole text. The editors have spent years on their translation, tracking down the names of animals, foods, plants, agricultural implements, kitchen gadgets and medicines, and have judged the register ...”

“... but Stendhal would probably have changed that. He considered another, worse possibility: The Rose of the North. ‘A flat and pretentious title,’ he ruefully commented, ‘which seemed fine to me yesterday.’ The work was written in 1837, after Stendhal had abandoned Lucien Leuwen, before he found La Chartreuse. It offers us some hundred pages of the ...”

“... Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it ...”

“... the Polish nobility in Galicia triggered a series of massacres, as Polish and Ruthenian peasants rose up against their landlords. Hunger riots were reported in Germany and France. During the following year, deepening political and confessional tensions in Switzerland culminated in the Sonderbund War, in the course of which ...”

“... Louis Philippe out of the Tuileries Palace, the Paris crowd stormed the Chamber of Deputies, where France’s political elite was fighting over the remnants of the July Monarchy. A series of ministers had been trying to form a provisional government under the regency of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the former king’s daughter-in-law, who was sitting calmly in ...”

“... in interpreting the myth itself and drawing out what Piaf meant – and still means – to France and to her wider audience. The final three chapters are about her posthumous meanings and her adoption by everyone from François Hollande to Lady Gaga. Looseley, who teaches contemporary French culture at the University of Leeds, is too much given to ...”

“... two women who are the subject of Ruth Butler’s new book – Hortense Fiquet (Paul Cézanne) and Rose Beuret (Auguste Rodin) – Doncieux was first the artist’s mistress and later his wife. Hiring a model cost a minimum of one franc an hour; painting the woman who already shared your bed was clearly the cheaper alternative. Though both Monet and Cézanne ...”

“... theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the pain. He was a Cheekie Chappie. He was a little man, who had taken on a ponderous, pompous, stuffed society, defied all its conventions, punctured its hypocrisies, incurred its ...”

“... its borders. Later that year, a pillar of Europe’s outer defences began to crumble when Libyans rose up against Gaddafi’s dictatorship. Italy and Libya had signed a bilateral agreement on migration in 2004 that allowed Italy to deport undocumented migrants back to Libya. Italy also paid for the construction of several detention centres in Libya, with the ...”

“... deportation, released after less than three years in prison. On a summer’s day in 1944, with France newly liberated, Henri Boleslawski, who during the Vichy years had worked as an official in the préfecture of Tulle forging identity documents for the Resistance and for the Allied airmen they were sheltering, put his daughter, Liliane, on his shoulders ...”

“... live with Alfred, who refused to enrol them at school. He took them to lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne instead, and to the opera. His second wife, a pianist and composer, enrolled Eric and his brother at the Conservatoire. According to one teacher Eric was ‘the laziest student’ in the place, ‘gifted but indolent’ – another called ...”

“... the threshold of pure musical development. That threshold was crossed, it seems, in 17th-century France. We hear of cors de chasse in operas by Rossi and Cavalli, and in Lully’s incidental music to Molière’s comedy La Princesse d’Elide. Lully’s music has survived, and it’s possible to see from his ‘Air des Valets’ – helpfully reprinted in ...”

“... his three volumes of war memoirs, published in the 1950s, sometimes at critical junctures: as France faced defeat in Indochina, for example, or five years later, when he had emerged from his long hibernation to entrench himself as president of the Fifth Republic. By ‘myth’, Hazareesingh means a coherent story that binds listeners together and speaks ...”