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“... effects attest to this. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being the Czech exile Sabina disturbs her French friends by being unable to last out a parade held to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: ‘She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil ...”

“... In 1846 Karl Marx published a version of a chapter about suicide which had recently appeared in a book by one Jacques Peuchet entitled Mémoires tirées des archives de la police. Peuchet had been an encyclopedist and statistician of some distinction, and is said to have invented the term ‘bureaucracy’. He had survived the Revolution, and under the restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978 ...”

“... is also being psychoanalysed and looking after her child. At the time of the bombardment of the Karl Marx Hof, a block of workers’ tenements, by police and soldiers of Chancellor Dollfuss’s Fascist government, she becomes a very active member of the anti-Fascist resistance in Austria. Apart from the fact that Julia comes to a tragic end, the ...”

“... From the​ 1970s to the 1990s anyone who, like me, was interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework ...”

“... Giscard d’Estaing. Like Georges Pompidou, anthologist of poetry, Mitterrand was nurtured on the French classics. Brought up near Cognac in a Catholic family, he was always bookish, and thought of being a priest; later, although a man of action, a Resistance fighter, and a student of Marxism, he seems always to have valued his lifeline to childhood and the ...”

“... emails. So in fact, if you really want to know what happens in this book, what happens is that Karl Ove writes, or is distracted by his family from writing, or has to get away for a few weeks to write, etc. We know what he wrote, of course, because it is in the other volumes; but here we do not yet know what he is writing, if you see what I ...”

“... young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in ...”

“... we had been brought up. Among the most exciting of the new approaches was that of the school of French historians associated with the journal Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations. What made their work exciting was, first of all, the sense they conveyed that nothing was off-limits for the historian, no aspect of life too obscure: everything, from ...”

“... Quelle est cette odeur agréable/Bergers, qui ravit tous nos sens?’ In the old French carol, the shepherds to whom the angel announces the birth of Christ are first struck by a ravishing scent they can’t identify, then by a great light, and finally by heavenly sounds. This introduction of a smell to the Annunciation story has no biblical justification, as far as I can discover, but it certainly stakes a claim for smell in a hierarchy of the senses ...”

“... his vices and discovering, and tentatively translating, the great Viennese ‘anti-journalist’ Karl Kraus. The Kraus Project is Franzen’s reckoning with his undergraduate self; with his ambitions and frustrations; with his completist tendencies to let no juvenilia go to waste and no headline go unremarked; and with the publishing legacy of the generation ...”

“... dated (provisionally) 5 April 1919, is to G. Jean-Aubry (a future biographer). The original, in French, is transcribed, annotated and translated: Dear Friend. Would you like to come for lunch on Saturday, if that suits you, or by the 4.30 p.m. train? Get your ticket for Wye because at the moment our motor-car is at the coachbuilder’s and it will be ...”

“... should flock to Britain to see at first hand what they had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance of themselves by following Walter Scott in the street, demanding to be allowed to draw him. But they were disappointed by British art, and of the modern buildings Defauconpret could only mutter: ‘des briques, des briques et toujours des ...”

“... the only true inheritor of the late B.S. Johnson’s mantle as one of the serious Anglicises of French modes.’ Heady stuff. No British reviewer or critic would write like that now. Many younger readers (older readers too) have no awareness of B.S. Johnson’s work, though I gather he’s big in the US thesis market. Yet the ICA devoted three evenings in ...”

“... ago in London, during the winter of 1789. Frosty weather – the widower is warm against ‘the French insurrection’. Christmas Day takes him to church. Three years go by, and on the same day the same church receives him. ‘It vexed me that even on the festival of Christmas I was melancholy. I went with my son James to St George’s, Hanover Square, and ...”

“... the standard by which all other works about Charles should be judged’ is the German historian Karl Brandi’s whopping Kaiser Karl V. Embarking on it in 1907, Brandi published Volume 1 thirty years later. It was translated into English two years after that: just in time for Anne Frank to read it in her secret Amsterdam ...”