Word: frenchness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MARRY ME, MARRY ME. Courtship, love and marriage in a community of French Jews are the subjects of this wistful film directed by Claude Berri...
There-this essay (from the French, essai, to try, test) has officially degenerated into a morass of egocentric affectations and Harvardian putdowns. It's the thing you've got to watch out for here. For I haven't told you about how Harvard tears you apart, because that is the part that is difficult to tell. (See John Updike's short story "The Christian Roommates" in his collection The Music School or, on a once-removed level read John Berth's The End of the Road. ) Despite, or maybe because of, our spurious elitism, we are an insecure bunch. Harvard...
Those who want to divine why French public administration is a marvel of codified precision and bureaucratic bungling will find 61 pages on the subject. There they will learn about the schools that produce the French Establishment, quirks of the Code Civil, the ratio of policemen per capita (one for every 347 people) and the 1949 decree that governs a concierge's weekly cleaning of a courtyard, "devoting one minute and a half per square meter for the first forty meters and thirty seconds per square meter for the remaining surface...
France is much in thrall to its own version of the heroic past. Accordingly, Gramont invokes, analyzes and denigrates Jules Michelet, the great French Romantic historian whose writings helped to "create" France's epic past. When Gramont describes French intellectual life, he gives a useful though jaundiced look at Descartes, including his life and times, his seminal Discours de la Méthode and the Freudian analysis of the philosopher's three dreams, which symbolized the difficulty of understanding the universe...
...most stimulating demands on his talent. If he had never piloted a plane, for example, how much sweeter the triumph of posing before fawning New York crowds as a returning aeronautical hero. He could not read a word in Le Figaro, but he came on convincingly as a French navy lieutenant named Royal...