but when I embed it in some XML

does the fragment that you generate have the same encoding as the XML
file into which you mbed it? If ut doesn't you will scramble the
characters, which appears to be what has happened.

Jackpot. I took out the XSLT filter, and it turns out the page encoding
is ISO-8859-1. Using <xsl:output encoding="ISO-8859-1"> does the trick.

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 John English              | mailto:je@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je
 School of Computing & MIS | "Those who don't know their history
 University of Brighton    |  are condemned to relive it" (Santayana)
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