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“... Like good detective novels, the letters of remission which are the subject of Natalie Zemon Davis’s most recent book usually start with a corpse which requires to be explained. Other offences – tax riot, heresy, the defloration of a virgin – could be the occasion for the ‘pardon tales’ such letters contained, but the procedure was most often resorted to by someone who had been the cause of someone else’s death ...”

“... Richard Cobb, who died last year at the age of 79, began his career as a historian of Revolutionary France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in French, but as time went on a strong personal vein and a taste for high comedy widened the scope of his writing and revealed a highly distinctive English style: intricate perceptions and sensations set down in long, baroque sentences, full of Gallicisms, argot and incantatory lists of French and English place-names ...”

“... The life of François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778), could hardly have been as colourful as that of the eponymous hero of his most famous novella, Candide. In his brief but eventful life, Candide encounters, inter alia, massacre, pillage, rape, piracy, mutilation, brutal militarism, cannibalism, slavery, bestiality, vivisection, religious fanaticism and political intolerance ...”

“... other, we should know that they were all dead. The volume of essays, edited by Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas in honour of Richard Cobb, deals mostly with the later years of the Revolution, between the fall of Robespierre and the advent of Bonaparte. The period has always been rather an embarrassment to historians who are looking for patterns. If the Terror ...”

“... hideous, his mouth wide open and his teeth falling to the ground’. In the years between, Colin Jones shows, another, barely perceptible revolution occurred: polite society accepted the open-mouthed smile. Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun’s ‘Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie’ (1786). Wariness of the laugh (le rire) among classical ...”

“... these popular images of the Enlightenment have retained considerable force. Textbooks (including Colin Jones’s superb new one) have repeated them to new generations of readers, while literary historians such as Daniel Mornet have taken them for granted and proceeded to tell the story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian ...”

“... ripped the bandage from his jaw. In​ The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, Colin Jones, a professor of history at Queen Mary, offers a suspenseful and original account of this episode. The book is suspenseful because, even though we know the way things end, it relates the build-up to Robespierre’s execution in breathless ...”

“... create, and methodologically couldn’t have created, a school of history. As his former student Colin Lucas explains in an entry in the DNB, while Cobb’s students ‘learned the value of the provincial history of the period, the importance of large-scale reading of manuscript archives at all levels, and the necessity of a real enthusiasm for ...”

“... David Robert Jones, alias David Bowie, is now in his 40th year. His creepy, chilling phrases pop out of pub jukeboxes, and extracts from his movies catch the eye on pub videos, whether he is embracing a Chinese girl or being executed by Japanese soldiers; his image appears in the Sunday-paper magazines, artistically displayed in sundry poses ...”

“... Choderlos de Laclos​ ’s Liaisons dangereuses is remembered for its salacious intrigues, but it’s also about the condition of women. Addressing the Vicomte de Valmont, her partner in games of intimate deception, the Marquise de Merteuil declares that all aspects of social life are more fraught with danger for women: ‘As for you men, your defeats are only a success the less ...”

“... surplus value’ involved consumers’ mouths as much as their wardrobes (not coincidentally, as Colin Jones has observed, the encounter between colonial sugar and European teeth also helped spur a revolution in European dentistry).When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen arrived in the Caribbean colonies, some white plantation owners ...”

“... training in the mountains for the invasion of Norway’. On the evening of D-Day, Esther and Colin, a sapper she’s been ‘stepping out with’, sneak down to the camp after last orders. Esther hasn’t told her father about Colin. Arthur Evans is a ‘staunch nationalist’: he’s only been to England once, to a ...”

“... Newcomb, ‘the Angel Lady’, who writes a number of columns in the mystical press, teaches at Colin Fry’s International College of Spiritual Science and Healing in Ramsbergsgarden, Sweden, runs www.angellady.co.uk, and has now written a book, An Angel Treasury: A Celestial Collection of Inspirations, Encounters and Heavenly Lore ...”

“... his meed of lectures, tutorials and research students. Nevertheless, the book-addicted young, the Colin Wilsons of our time, find John Cowper instantly available in the heart of London, at the Village Bookshop, hard by Piccadilly Circus, that alternative campus. There is here a bust of John Cowper, with large pictures of his photogenic face. There is a wall ...”

“... art. Should you decide to do so, however, you’d better watch out for Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn. Colin Renfrew, as he’s probably better known, is the author of Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology (Duckworth, £9.99). ‘Clandestine and unpublished digging of archaeological sites for gain, i.e. looting . . . is the source of ...”