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“... wondered how the soldiers must have felt when they returned after years in the slaughterhouse of France. What a refuge this damp, ugly outline must have promised them. This time, he too felt like a refugee: the victim of an emotional war who had been sent away to convalesce. Here are the seeds of the reader’s problem: Wyn Douglas, disciplined, committed ...”

“... in the backseats of young France The concierge is calling her – Madame. Madame? An old albatross the scuffed white of lobby magazines. An old albatross, but content as she wanders off the edge of the continent. A Room in Paris, 1855 An alchemist’s gas lamp reaches shakily into one ...”

“... the background and setting for Higonnet’s study. She focuses on three women: Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, who became Joséphine Bonaparte; Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard, nicknamed Juliette and later famous as Madame Récamier; and Juana María Ignacia Cabarrus y Galabert, who went by the name of Térézia Tallien and was known ...”

“... which led to his making the acquaintance of a fellow guildsman called Thomas Cromwell. Vaughan rose to a degree of professional eminence on Cromwell’s coat-tails, beginning in the years when Cromwell himself was merely a protégé of Thomas Wolsey. Together they helped Wolsey dissolve monasteries to fund his two new educational foundations at Ipswich and ...”

“... moral objections to Jean of Meung’s ‘continuation’ of Guillaume of Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. In France, partly because of fun and games in the Canard Enchaîné, Gerson evokes memories of clerical anguish about masturbation; students of Erasmus may also too readily accept his delight in belittling an author he ...”

“... was a Lorrainer, who, after entering the service of the French King, first as an army officer (he rose to be a general) and then as ambassador at Rome and Vienna, eventually went back to Versailles to become Minister for Foreign Affairs. During the 1760s he held other portfolios, engineered the Family Compact of the Bourbon courts, which was intended to ...”

“... of the Eternal Father, in order to relieve that assembly of its functions and to give new laws to France’. Others were its victims: men who had suffered ‘reversals of fortune’ and become deranged through fear of requisitions, state persecution and the guillotine. Many, women particularly, were no more than bystanders who had been stressed beyond ...”

“... rebuke to the ideal. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of single mothers in this country rose faster than at any other time in history, seemingly unaffected by an increasingly strident Conservative rhetoric of blame. The most pervasive image was of an unemployed teenager who had deliberately got herself pregnant in order to claim benefits, although ...”

“... say you wrote a 400-page novel in order to let your mother know you were gay. This was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of ...”

“... this dark caesura in my head. At night we heard it make lament. It summoned the battlefields of France, and killing fields in Africa and Spain, the topless and the falling towers, and armies marching over damp terrain, and suicidal men who flew from shore to shore, who could not think in metaphor, and I believe we wept full sore. We turned to books and ...”

“... But he is disconcerted by what he experiences. No one in Stanford has the slightest interest in France, or in Europe. He watches old American films on television and reflects that nothing has changed since they were made. He has unfortunate experiences with young Americans who are not slow to abandon their initial good manners, who become aggressive in a ...”

“... Stein bought for her collection, Laurencin stands head and shoulders above Picasso, holding a pink rose. In the second, her flouncy blue dress distracts from the rest of the group, in sombre browns and greys. This painting shows five women and three men, but it is the men who are usually remembered. Russian Cubists such as Natalia Goncharova and Lyubov Popova ...”

“... matter how apparently unyielding, seems to have gone unmarshalled. Dickens made several trips to France in the early 1860s, and though ‘there is no proof that it was Nelly who took Dickens to France the summer of 1862, or that the reason for her being in France was that she was ...”

“... says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading ...”

“... accelerated as faith in the promises of utopianism has declined. The very idea that utopias, those rose-tinted cities stranded outside time, might have a history is itself a recent discovery, and has largely sprung from assessments of More’s Utopia, the work that revived the ancient genre of the ideal commonwealth for the modern world. More’s work has been ...”