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“... Here, a decade ahead of its time, is the language used in fiction by Arthur Koestler or Victor Serge to express the self-abasement of old Bolshevik victims of the Great Purges. The Prophet Armed describes Trotsky’s rise and apogee, from his birth in a Jewish farming family near Odessa to the summit of his power and influence at the end of the ...”

“... 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting friendship with André ...”

“... was different: students were building the ‘invisible international that the great revolutionary Victor Serge wrote of’. Widgery had spotted the promiscuous exchanges of icons and rallying cries going on in the UK that undermined the ‘revolution’ by assimilating it to lifestyle changes. ‘Acid hippies, progressive bohemians and bored pop ...”

“... The pavilion’s architecture is international, the work of two émigrés, Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff. The things in the exhibition – paintings (mainly figurative), documentary photographs and bronze sculptures – like the half-dozen poems printed in the catalogue, represent a specifically English sensibility. Lines from the poems select ...”

“... The Resistance had saved its honour, and Potsdam its face, but it was a survivor rather than a victor power. Economically, France was still a predominantly rural society, with a per capita income a little over half of the British standard. Sociologically, the peasantry remained by far its largest class: 45 per cent of the population. Politically, the ...”