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“... Jean Genet’s flirtation with radical politics began with his discovery – or was it entombment? – by Sartre. It is recorded that when Genet first read Saint Genet, he was cast into deep despair, an emotion shared by many others who have tried to read Sartre’s massive study ...”

“... after all, that made a series out of Tales of the City, that featured my own biography of Jean Genet on a South Bank Show and did a filmed version of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; now British television is filming Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library. American television would never initiate such programmes, which ...”

“... diverse and individual, he settles down to record them, beginning with Gore Vidal and ending with Jean Genet. His manner is to give detailed and surprisingly readable accounts of the plots of an author’s salient novels, sprinkling these accounts with sharp comments as to the thought or motive that may have lain behind such and such a device of plotting ...”

“... why it was initially criticised for its strange hybrid nature). Céline, Henry Miller, Colette and Jean Genet followed; and autofiction has gained something of a stranglehold on French literature in the decades since Doubrovsky named it. Over the past decade or two this trend has given rise to many works of remarkable intimacy, at times to great effect ...”

“... They say​ that when Jean Genet made occasional visits to London after the war his first stop was always the Rembrandt room in the National Gallery, to see Self-Portrait at the Age of 63. The portrait is dated 1669: Genet believed it was the last Rembrandt painted. (Not true, apparently ...”

“... pinching stuff from parked cars? An incompetent thief, perhaps – which was what Cocteau called Genet, the delinquent in question: ‘You are a bad thief, you get caught. But you are a good writer.’ Genet said much the same thing about himself in a late interview. But then what happens when this incompetent thief ...”

“... Family in The Philosophy of Right. All down the right-hand column runs a text from the writings of Jean Genet. The ploy – to show that all meaning ‘deconstructs’ other meaning if sufficiently cannily placed is brilliantly effective. For what more obvious source, in ‘the philosophy of the West’, for the sanctity of the family, and the status of ...”

“... billowing image of Isaac Babel. In 1989 he arrived with a previously unpublished photograph of Jean Genet, which he had taken in the early 1970s. It was the most tremendous close-up: just nose, eyebrows and set mouth. You could count the pores. As he handed the picture over, he described how he had taken it, in a hotel in Lancaster Gate. And he ...”

“... for the writers who took up with him – Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Sartre and Beauvoir, Jean Genet and others – though none under B for Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from David Sylvester – another S – for disparaging Giacometti’s work in the 1950s, and then for revising his ...”

“... the 17th century, la maison came into the possession of Marie Desmares, known as la Champmeslé, Jean Racine’s mistress and the most famous tragedienne of her day. Racine died in a house in the Rue Visconti immediately behind la Champmeslé’s garden and Balzac’s printing-press: a plaque near a dismal doorway gives all but the medical details. The poet ...”

“... inhabited by the famous and the artistic. There is an amusing anecdote about an encounter with Jean Genet in Venice, when Hayim introduces him to a ‘shocking’ but unspecified sexual act of apparently almost insurmountable difficulty. Hayim’s lonely, indulgent, likeable mother seems to have been the love of his life. He is heartbroken at her ...”

“... I got to the chapter featuring two people whose work I happen to know and love, Paul Bowles and Jean Genet, that the spell was broken. All of a sudden, this oddfellow’s odyssey didn’t feel quite so whimsical – it felt borderline exploitative, as though she was using these people, or their memory, to make herself look good. Bowles was sort of ...”

“... then, ‘all his life long Malraux was an actor playing Malraux.’ A conscious echo, no doubt, of Jean Cocteau’s remark that ‘Victor Hugo was a mad-man who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ But Lottman’s – and others’ – objection to Malraux was less that he was mad than that he was misleading. ‘For all of his life André Malraux let it be ...”

“... traumas and repressions inflicted on their author by his mother: the result is somewhere between Jean Genet and Huckleberry Finn, funny and sweet, but also horrible. Religion is a keenly contested matter in Lake Wobegon: If you’re not Catholic, you’re absolutely not Catholic. We don’t go in for nondenominationalism and tolerance. In the Bible we ...”

“... choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ? It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as Bruce and Buster and Charlie were driving £2,631,684 in mail bags to Leather-slade Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster ...”