Search Results

“... But this talent wasn’t necessarily combined with other painterly abilities. Gainsborough and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour were both reckoned remarkable getters of likeness, and both had significant weaknesses, or lack of interest, in other departments. Contemporaries claim again and again that their portraits seem to put you in the presence of a ...”

“... painter.In a film for the BBC in 1983, when he was in his late eighties, Jacques Lartigue was keen to stress the most fortuitous aspects of his career. ‘There was a fairy over my cradle,’ he said. He claimed that he never ran after a photograph; the photograph always came to him. He rarely needed more than three or four shots, and almost always worked ...”

“... squeezing fruit in the market? ‘I’ll suggest it to my husband, but I don’t think he’d be keen,’ says my train acquaintance Josette; nevertheless, she is radiantly travelling back from a solo package weekend in Venice, leaving three teenagers with her husband. Liberation of varying degrees is under way among Parisian women. But it seems there is a ...”

“... the maritime powers. Mahan coveted, for instance, the Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and the Île de Maurice (ceded in 1814 to Britain, which named it Mauritius), since they were ‘so well suited for the control of the Indian Ocean, the one a rich agricultural colony, the other a powerful naval station’. Island outposts were and remain useful as military and ...”

“... unravelling, no stable stylistic formula lay in sight. ‘Cezanne’s doubt’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty called it in an essay of 1945, is regularly taken as the tipping point for 20th-century painting’s tumbling dynamics. Less discussed are the beliefs that might have prompted Cezanne to embark on his inquiries. Behind the present survey ...”

“... Meanwhile the entertainment industry in Paris was flourishing: performers like Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Django Reinhardt, Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf, abetted by the jazz-inspired youth culture of the zazous, offered the Germans opportunities for rest and recreation that scarcely existed back home. On top of that, the occupying ...”

“... and his book is a model of recent French historiography, in the tradition of Pierre Nora and Maurice Agulhon. He is also a political scientist, intrigued by the general’s stake in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of anxiety, brought on by ...”

“... rememberer. How close was the escape? Since 1936, Cobb has told his story many times. At Oxford Maurice Bowra used to wheel him out, like a jester, with the port and nuts, to regale Wadham high table with his rollicking tale of blood. After five decades of rehearsal, Cobb tells his story extremely well: he’s familiar with its outline, its emphases, its ...”

“... provisional government assumed power in the wake of the Allied-led liberation in mid-1944. Keen to rekindle French pride after the humiliation of military defeat and occupation, the general relied heavily on ritual: his famous parade down the Champs-Elysées that August, just after the liberation of Paris itself, conveyed the transcendent image of a ...”

“... as Chris Bryant, leader of the Christian Socialist Movement, disarmingly admits, ‘has been keen not to be too explicit about his religious commitment ... Quite rightly, both he and Straw are hesitant to proclaim their Christian faith for fear of appearing self-righteous or exclusive and fanatical.’ Is this a tacit admission that, in a secular ...”

“... him back from the political wilderness in 1940. He was implacable and proud of it. When his son, Maurice, wondered why his own career had fallen so far short of his father’s, Macmillan said: ‘Because you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed ...”

“... the intended tone of this book partly because Gordon presents himself as essentially a man with a keen sense of humour, and you never know where you are with people like that. He laughs in the wrong place at a friend’s poetry reading. He giggles at names like Rees-Mogg, and splits his sides at the list of those who supported Count Tolstoy (ha ha) in the ...”

“... as an entrance into imagining and longing and learning. In her teens she belonged in a set of keen young readers and writers, girls and boys – they shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept lists of all the books she ...”

“... a transfer to the German camp, where they might find more intellectual company. ‘The others were keen to go,’ Murray writes, ‘hoping it might improve their German, but Momigliano dissuaded them on the grounds that it was better to be three Italian professors in a camp full of waiters and restaurateurs than three waiters in a camp full of German ...”

“... gangster. Several of Campbell’s principals – Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Jérôme Lindon, Maurice Girodias – also turn up in Lennon’s story, like Balzac’s recurring characters or, less charitably, like figures in some bizarre soap opera. Naturally, the principal locale is the café or the bar, notably the Deux Magots, the Closerie des Lilas, the ...”