Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sturdy and reflective, unwilling to accept imported style wholesale, English artists and craftsmen took French Gothic and, once it had been imposed on them by the Norman hierarchy in the major arts like architecture, transformed it in their minor arts. The image of the cathedral as the castle of God, its porches guarded by twin impregnable towers, was inspired by the donjons that the feudal barons built along the Seine and the Loire at the end of the 11th century, but in English cathedrals like Wells (constructed between 1186 and 1300) it acquired a definitive grandeur as the sign...
...Puritan massacre of statues and pictures passed all reckoning. The idea that such things were in a sense the general aesthetic or historical property of the people -- which did something to mitigate the anticlerical rage of the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks in Russia -- did not arise in 17th century England, whose churches were stripped and gutted as thoroughly as those of Byzantium had been by the Frankish thugs of the Fourth Crusade...
...equivalent to Chaucer, who installed English as a literary language in 1387 with The Canterbury Tales. The East Anglian manuscript style especially, in its whimsicality and odd narratives, its overflowing, obsessive love of natural forms -- leaves, flowers, birds, animals, combining and recombining -- is quite unlike the traditional formalities of French Gothic painting. It is both more earthy and more fantasticated. Some of it looks forward to the nature worship of the Romantics, centuries later. Some predicts writers like Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter. This, one realizes, is where the Englishness of English art was born: between the vellum sheets...
...week was Attorney General Edwin Meese, who is sharply criticized in the report for failing to seek advice before telling the President that he could legally sell arms to Iran without informing Congress. Meese testified that he relied on an opinion written in 1981 by former Attorney General William French Smith. But the report points out that Smith had advised that Congress would have to be notified once arms shipments were under way. Said the report: "There is only one reason to have an attorney general on the NSC: to give the President independent and sound advice. That...
British trade officials are not alone in provoking the wrath of U.S. authorities. In May 1985, according to the French newsmagazine L'Express, five cases of industrial materials were shipped via Air France from Paris to Luxembourg, where the crates were to be placed aboard an Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow. French customs agents had not bothered to check out the cases, but Luxembourg officials demanded they be opened. Inside they found equipment for the manufacture of so-called bubble memory chips, a U.S.-made state-of-the-art semiconductor ideally suited for storing guidance information in missiles. A French...