William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist and illustrator. He is known for his satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of British society, and the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which was adapted for a 1975 film by Stanley Kubrick.
The Luck of Barry Lyndon is a picaresque novel by English author William Makepeace Thackeray, first published as a serial in Fraser's Magazine in 1844, about a member of the Irish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy. Thackeray, who based the novel on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney, later reissued it under the title The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. The novel is narrated by Lyndon himself, who functions as a quintessentially unreliable narrator.
A pentacle is a talisman that is used in magical evocation, and is usually made of parchment, paper, cloth, or metal, upon which a magical design is drawn. Symbols may also be included, a common one being the six-point form of the Seal of Solomon.
Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism. Isou viewed his fellow countryman Tristan Tzara as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers. Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s.
Provençal is a variety of Occitan, spoken by people in Provence and parts of Drôme and Gard. The term Provençal used to refer to the entire Occitan language, but more recently it has referred only to the variety of Occitan spoken in Provence. However, it can still be found being used to refer to Occitan as a whole, e.g. Merriam-Webster states that it can be used to refer to general Occitan, though this is going out of use.
Étienne Nicolas Méhul was a French composer of the late classical and early romantic periods. He was known as "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution". He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic". He is known particularly for his operas, written in keeping with the reforms introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Snob is a pejorative term for a person who feels is superior due to their social class, education level, or social status in general; sometimes used specially when they pretend to belong to these classes. The word snobbery came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s.
The National Front for an Independent France, better known simply as National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the resistance organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain.
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard was a prolific French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville, and numerous variations throughout his career. Art historians and critics have called him "the first star of French caricature's great age", and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary, and "the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination". The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement.
The long and short scales are two of several naming systems for integer powers of ten which use some of the same terms for different magnitudes.
Macedonia or macédoine is a French culinary term referring to a salad composed of small pieces of fruit or vegetables. Fruit Macedonia is a fresh fruit salad and is a common dessert in Greece, Romania, Spain, France, Italy and South America. Vegetable Macedonia or Macédoine de légumes nowadays is usually a cold salad or hors d'oeuvre of diced vegetables, in France often including red beans. Macédoine de légumes is also a hot vegetable dish consisting of the same vegetables served with butter. Prepared macédoine, a mixture of diced vegetables and often peas, is often sold canned or frozen. It is sometimes mixed with mayonnaise combined with aspic stock, making it similar to Russian salad.
Flâneur is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.
Philippe Jullian was a French illustrator, art historian, biographer, aesthete, novelist and dandy.
Faire chabrot or faire chabròl is an ancient Occitanian custom whereby at the end of a soup or broth, one adds red wine to the bowl to dilute the remnants and brings it to the lips to drink in large gulps.
Shoneenism is a pejorative term, used in Ireland from at least the 18th century, to describe Irish people who are viewed as adhering to Anglophile snobbery. Some late 19th and early 20th century Irish nationalist writers, like D. P. Moran (1869–1936), used the term shoneen, alongside the term West Brit, to characterize those who displayed snobbery, admiration for England or mimicked the English nobility. A stereotypical shoneen also reputedly shows corresponding disdain for Irish nationalism and the decolonisation of Irish culture, such as the Irish language and Irish traditional music.
Zinzolin or gingeolin is an old or literary color name that means a reddish purple color. It is often used to describe clothing.
Frédéric Rouvillois is a French academic and author. He is a Professor of Public Law at Paris Descartes University and the author of more than 30 books.
Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers, also known simply as Traviès, was a Swiss-born French painter, lithographer, and caricaturist whose work appeared regularly in Le Charivari and La Caricature. His Panthéon Musical was one of the most famous and widely reproduced musical caricatures of the 19th century. His younger brother was the painter and illustrator Édouard Traviès.
Crafty, real name Victor Eugène Géruzez was a French comic writer and illustrator, specialising in books about horses and hunting on horseback.
Dominique Lebrun is a French artist, journalist and historian of American cinema.
