Word: mme
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about the age itself). Julian's story brims with figures and rituals familiar to British fiction: barmy relatives, eccentric aristocrats, a public school -- the "English Gulag" -- where the headmaster enjoys hitting boys with sticks. As a teenager, Julian spends a summer in Brittany, where French is taught by Mme. de Normandin and sex by her daughter Barbara. Later, while trying to avoid work in the army, he learns another of life's essential lessons: "Not-really-trying is just as much effort as trying-really-hard. The only difference between the two modes of activity is that not-really-trying...
...couple, these two provocateurs of passion. Her salon is a school in which girls may unlearn their innocence. And he is the ideal professor for a young lady's sentimental education. Just now Valmont has two pupils in mind: a naive, eager teenager (Uma Thurman) and the beautiful, pious Mme. de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), who keeps resisting Valmont's purring declarations of love. And then, to his astonishment, he realizes that he means them. In a rake, sincerity is lethal. He who has lived by the word will die by the sword. And Mme. la Marquise will founder with...
Shawcross ferrets out a wealth of political, diplomatic and intelligence detail, as well as a fragrant cache of jet-set gossip. In his prime, the Shah had a special yen for Lufthansa hostesses but also entertained a variety of lovelies flown in from Mme. Claude's in Paris. His other tastes were rich, but, oddly, Iran's leading personage did not eat caviar...
...with unfaltering logic: the passion has gone out of their union; therefore she must leave him. But fate intervenes, as it always does in a comedy of mores. When Howard suffers a heart attack, Paulie sets aside her resolve -- until she uncovers his passing liaison with a would-be Mme. de Pompadour of the shopping malls. That propels her into New York City, where Son Jason, a punk-rock musician who lives in a Bronx tenement, and his pregnant girlfriend Flame, nee Sara, add to the imbroglio. But, after all manner of marital peccadilloes, Wolitzer (In the Palomar Arms) spins...
...while inverting some earlier writing about Picasso -- hagiography of the goat god, by members of his claque -- Huffington produces something just as hokey. She comes on like a cross between Marabel Morgan and Mme. Defarge. She is out to avenge all of the women in his life -- "goddesses and doormats," in Picasso's nasty phrase -- except his late widow Jacqueline Roque, whom she denounces. Her biography becomes an interminable pecking session, to the point where she even finds fault with Picasso for becoming rich. "It took a lot of money to keep Picasso in bohemia," sneers the author...