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In Praise of Power

Alexander Nagel: Bernini the Ruthless, 3 January 2013

Bernini: His Life and His Rome 
by Franco Mormando.
Chicago, 429 pp., £22.50, December 2011, 978 0 226 53852 5
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... Self Portrait’ (1635) Franco Mormando has a lot to tell us about Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Rome of his day, but one lasting lesson is that just about everyone who knew him hated him. The harshest criticism came from his mother, who in 1638 wrote an exasperated letter to Pope Urban VIII’s nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini ...

Dashing for Freedom

Paul Foot, 12 December 1996

Full Disclosure 
by Andrew Neil.
Macmillan, 481 pp., £20, October 1996, 0 333 64682 7
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... which stands out most in the memory of his fellow feasters: a lunch, in a private room at the Due Franco restaurant in Islington, the highlight of which was the entry of a nervous, near-naked strip-o-gram lady who sat on Neil’s knee and slowly removed his shirt and vest. While everyone else hovered on the edge of death by embarrassment, Neil, according to ...

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western Civ’ at first hand, perhaps underplays the classical origins of the idea. ‘Civilisation’ in the classical tradition already incorporated many of its contemporary meanings, from advanced technology and ...

Mallarmé gets a life

Barbara Johnson, 18 August 1994

Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice 
by Gordon Millan.
Secker, 389 pp., £16.99, March 1994, 9780436270963
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... work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon Millan’s Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice. Millan notes in his ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Carlos Saura, 16 June 2011

... and story. But it is more than that. It is what the images and the story are not quite saying. Paul Julian Smith, in a subtle essay accompanying the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, reminds us that it was shot as Franco was dying, and that the Spanish people then ‘looked back in fear and forward with ...

Constitutional Fantasy

Jan-Werner Müller: Verhofstadt’s Vision, 1 June 2017

Europe’s Last Chance: Why the European States Must Form a More Perfect Union 
by Guy Verhofstadt.
Basic, 304 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 0 465 09685 5
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... achieved can be credited to national leaders, namely, Merkel and Hollande. Verhofstadt thinks such Franco-German leadership only reinforces the blindness that Paul-Henri Spaak (another Belgian), one of the founders of European integration, long ago observed. There are only two kinds of state in Europe, Spaak said: small ...

Peoplehood

David Abulafia, 31 October 1996

The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain 
by Benzion Netanyahu.
Random House, 1384 pp., $50, August 1995, 0 679 41065 1
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... Bishop of Burgos, for example, born a Jew and converted as a child with his father, the famous Paul of Burgos; or, with variations, by Juan de Torquemada, uncle of the inquisitor, who came from what was quite probably a converso family. No one would seriously question the commitment to Christianity of this generation of converso Church leaders, nor that of ...

Devouring the pangolin

John Sutherland, 25 October 1990

The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History 
by Robert Darnton.
Faber, 393 pp., £25, September 1990, 0 571 14423 3
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... 1775-1800. His account drew on the archive of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, on the Franco-Swiss border. Using this material with great skill, Darnton was able to narrate what was involved in making and importing (sometimes smuggling) a subversive book into France in the Revolutionary era. He expertly digested the technicalities of the ...

Unmasking Monsieur Malraux

Richard Mayne, 25 June 1992

The Conquerors 
by André Malraux, translated by Stephen Becker.
Chicago, 198 pp., £8.75, December 1991, 0 226 50290 2
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The Temptation of the West 
by André Malraux, translated by Robert Hollander.
Chicago, 122 pp., £8.75, February 1992, 0 226 50291 0
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The Walnut Tree of Altenburg 
by André Malraux, translated by A.W. Fielding.
Chicago, 224 pp., £9.55, April 1992, 0 226 50289 9
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... Prize-winning novel Man’s Estate. Malraux’s subsequent role in the Spanish Civil War against Franco has also been questioned, largely because he threw in his lot with the Communists – although he continued to criticise them elsewhere. But he did raise money for the Republicans; he did organise the España air squadron; and he did risk his ...

Casino Politics

David Stevenson: Writing European history, 6 October 2005

The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-33 
by Zara Steiner.
Oxford, 938 pp., £35, April 2005, 0 19 822114 2
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... fullest in its coverage of international relations, Taylor’s volume having been complemented by Paul Schroeder’s Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848. Zara Steiner’s new history will inevitably be measured against these distinguished predecessors, and it stands up to the comparison: considered as a monument to scholarly stamina, it is even more ...

Communiste et Rastignac

Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner, 9 July 2009

Le Monde selon K. 
by Pierre Péan.
Fayard, 331 pp., €19, February 2009, 978 2 213 64372 4
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... its most visible and charismatic face. This group evolved into Médecins sans frontières, which Paul Berman describes in Power and the Idealists (2005) as ‘a more political Red Cross – a Red Cross willing to identify the political realities that create humanitarian crises’. In general, Kouchner thought, the left should not sit around while people got ...

The Hooks of her Gipsy Dresses

Nicholas Penny, 1 September 1988

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer 
by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington.
Weidenfeld, 559 pp., £16, June 1988, 0 02 977935 9
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... glamour (it bursts forth from the dust jacket)? If so, they are in respectable company. Paul Johnson (described in this paper some years ago by Lord Blake as the greatest living British journalist) has declared in the Spectator that he found the book ‘morbidly compulsive from start to finish’. It starts in a world that is now very ...

V.G. Kiernan writes about the Marx sisters

V.G. Kiernan, 16 September 1982

The Daughters of Karl Marx: Family Correspondence 1866-98 
edited by Olga Meier, translated by Faith Evans.
Deutsch, 342 pp., £14.95, June 1982, 0 233 97337 0
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... letters could not fail to supply welcome sidelights on the history of their times. During the Franco-Prussian War Laura and Paul Lafargue reported to Marx from Paris a curious atmosphere of unreality. ‘The beauties of the Boulevards are impatiently awaiting the invaders’; the workers seemed apathetic, and several ...

Berlinguer’s Legacy

Paul Ginsborg, 4 October 1984

... about the historic compromise. One of Berlinguer’s closest advisers at this time was Franco Rodano, whose own peculiar combination of Catholicism and Stalinism fuelled the attempt to reach agreement at the leadership level, in the expectation that decisions would then be transmitted downwards to the base of the two great mass organisations of ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... all in vain. Although the film was shown in many parts of Europe, including on the EU-supported Franco-German channel Arte, it was never shown on BBC2. Along with most of the other films in the series, it was quietly secreted away on BBC Knowledge, where it was safe from the eyes of the TV reviewers who might otherwise have generated some debate about the ...

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