The man whose voice had resonated from the tomb of exile

The man [de Gaulle] whose voice had resonated from the tomb of exile and emboldened its cringing listeners in their darkened rooms had stridden Paris like a giant. Though his gauntness bore poignant testimony to four long years of London fog and English food, he still had the bearing of a leader. he had stooped beneath the arc de Triomphe and laid a cross of white roses on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He had walked the length of the Champs-Élysées cheered from every tree and lamp post, saluted by officers whose cratered cheeks were moist with tears and kissed by pretty girls who darted from the crowd waving hankerchiefs and ribbons.

G. Robb, The Parisians (2010), 317

Baron Haussmann will not be asked to die for his Emperor

Baron Haussmann will not be asked to die for his Emperor, but he is prepared to sacrifice his reputation, which is besmirched almost every day - by liberals and socialists, who forget that the poor now have hospital beds and proper graves; by nostalgic bohemians, who forget everything; and even by his own social equals, who find the inconvenience of moving house too heavy a price to pay for the most beautiful city in the world

G. Robb, The Parisians (2010), 147

One can and may blame the wicked Fourth Crusade

Though one may bitterly deplore, as I do most fervently, that the Turks ever set foot in Europe, it would be absurd to blame them for the destruction of the Byzantine Empire as it would be to arraign the laws of hydrostatics for damage by flood. But one can and may blame the wicked Fourth Crusade for making that destruction inevitable and bringing about the wreck of eastern Europe for centuries

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 295

Nobody listens, but it is never turned off

The instrument [the radio] is nearly always faulty, all these sounds, turned on full blast, are strung in the connecting thread of an unbroken, ear-drum-puncturing and bat-like scream. Nobody listens, but it is never turned off. Towns are pandemonium. Every shop and cafe sends out a masterless, hydrophobic roar. These rabid wirelesses should be hunted out and muzzled or shot down like mad dogs. In the heart of the country, the silence of the most desolate places is suddenly rent by the blood-curdling howl of a rogue wireless set. ... But, like religion, it has been late in reaching the Mani, and among the towers a blessed silence prevails.

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 144

Each village was a long solid sheaf of towers

Each village was a long solid sheaf of towers. There were scores of them climbing into the sky in a rustic metropolis, each tower seeming to vie with the others in attaining  more preposterous height: a vision as bewildering as the distant skyline of Manhattan or that first apparition of gaunt medieval skyscrapers that meets the eyes of the traveller approaching San Giminiano aross the Tuscan plain. But there were no bridges or ships here, no bastioned town wall or procession of cypresses to detract from the bare upward thrust of all these perpendiculars of sun-refracting facet and dark shadow. The tops were sawn off flat, the gun slits invisible. These two mad villages of Kitta and Nomia shot straight out of the rock in a grove of rectangular pipes the sides facing in every direction so that some of the towers were flanked with a stripe of shade, some turned bare and two-dimensional towards the sun, others twisted in their sockets and seems to present two visible and equal sides, one in light and one in shade, of symmetrical prisms. Nothing moved and in the trembling and fiery light they had the hallucinating improbability of a mirage.

P.L. Fermor, Mani (1958), 82

None of the sensible Ephrussi children would go so far as that

It was understood that none of the sensible Ephrussi children would go so far as that [suicide]. Melancholy had its place. A café. It shouldn't be brought home.

E. de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), 133

It was only when there were questions from the floor that the evening became lively

It was only when there were questions from the floor that the evening became lively. People on both sides of the debate shouted and told stories of a personal nature which they mistook for proof of whatever it was they believed.

H. Jacobson, The Finckler Question (2010), 283

She looked too amazed by life to be English

She looked too amazed by life to be English. Her curls were too curly. Her lips were too big. Her teeth too white and even, like one big tooth arc of tooth with regular vertical markings. And her breasts had too much elevation and attack to be English. Had Jane Austen's heroines had breasts like these they would not have worried about ending up without a husband.

H. Jacobson, The Finckler Question (2010), 83

T'Hami at this time played golf to a handicap of four

T'hami [the Pasha of Marrakesh] at this time played golf to a handicap of four. (It is illogical, but strange, that the image of an amateur golf champion should be so hard to reconcile with that of an owner of active dungeons.)

G. Maxwell, Lords of the Atlas (1966), 200

A Second Awakening was driven by the evangelical energy of the frontier

Now, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Second Awakening was driven by the evangelical energy of the frontier. In 1776, some 10 per cent of Americans were church-goers; by 1815, it was a quarter; by 1914, it was half.

S. Sebag-Montefiore, Jerusalem (2011), 337