“... Museum’.This was not a fleeting love affair, soon forgotten. In 1908, Lenin came over from Paris for more than a month to work in the British Museum on his philosophical treatise Materialism and Empirio-criticism. He also presented his own published works to the library, as detailed in an appendix to Henderson’s book: at least four separate ...”

“... in at Hawaii en route for Saigon, he went ashore and bought a book about Vietnam by the late Bernard Fall. ‘Shit, this is what I’m getting into.’A revolutionary moment requires both extraordinary times and extraordinary people, and Ron Ridenhour, despite his laconic attitude, was one of the latter. He wouldn’t have denied, however, that there was ...”

“... philosophy was maintained under Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, as towers came to dominate the Paris skyline and the French population as a whole fell under the sway of gigantism and gadgets. But as John Ardagh points out in the revised edition of France Today, when Mitterrand challenged Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the confrontation was between a more ...”

“... desire, a trip on the Metro, is asked by her mother what she has done during her brief stay in Paris. J’ai vieilli, she says. Not: I have lived or learned or suffered or even necessarily, as Barbara Wright’s otherwise excellent translation has it, ‘I’ve aged’. Zazie may have aged but the idea is more sententious than anything else she says, and ...”

“... Toklas, the only book of hers that actually sold, but I think those that followed it – Picasso, Paris France, Wars I Have Seen – are wonderful too. Of course, I also love her more far-out earlier works, like Tender Buttons (1914) and the prose portraits and also many of the lectures, but not everything, not at all – one achievement of a true reading of ...”

“... hanged slowly with their feet roasting over a fire. As reports of these atrocities drifted back, Paris became seriously alarmed. Klobb was ordered to investigate and, if need be, relieve Voulet and Chanoine of their command; since he travelled lightly, he soon caught up with them. At first he’d found it hard to believe the reports, but then he arrived at ...”

“... least as important as the answers. Moreover, by dividing his library-burrowing between London and Paris, Dr Mennell has done something to bridge the ditch of separation between France and Britain in the matter of food. If most British students of French culinary traditions are handicapped by excess reverence, almost all French scholars – Lévi-Strauss for ...”

“... with me what will I have left?’ Wounding words were something of a fashion in late 19th-century Paris – each wit delivering his barbed mots in his own style. Whistler concluded his with ‘a shrill “Eh what?” ... Zola with a patronising hein mon bon ... Degas with a loud dites quoi?’ Jacques-Emile Blanche compared him to a cavalry major on the drill ...”

“... Proust’s unpublished work does not exist,’ Bernard de Fallois wrote in 1954. Provocative words, since he was introducing a whole volume of such material, and two years earlier had brought out Jean Santeuil, an unfinished novel Proust worked on between 1895 and 1899. De Fallois was trying to suggest, with a little too much bravado, that all Proust’s writing, early and late, published and unpublished, should be considered part of his great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu ...”

“... as ‘a reliable guide to his practice’. There are essays on Leavis, the poets of the Forties (Bernard Spencer, Alun Lewis, G.S. Fraser), on the Catholic novel, on George Steiner; the book is not quite the integral study its title may suggest. I have nothing against such collections; a lot of good critical writing disappears because of a prejudice against ...”

“... isn’t perfunctory. Does the victim have any enemies? Sollers and Kristeva – flanked by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has also showed up, as he does throughout the novel – indicate that he does. Who? ‘The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! … Um, Hélène Cixous!’ Bayard writes these ...”

“... interior minister, warned that within days Russian tanks would be rolling through the streets of Paris. Pundits predicted that the stock exchange would collapse and leaders of the right lamented the impending collectivisation of the French economy. In the major cities, however, there were scenes reminiscent of the Liberation of 1944, as people danced, sang ...”

“... turning out regularly at intersections across the country to slow up traffic, and marching through Paris and the big provincial cities. Hasty polls announced that 70 or 80 per cent of the population, including many in France’s largest conurbations, supported this massive show of impatience. Yet the gilets jaunes first came together beyond the margins of the ...”

“... milieu in order to see works of art held in private collections. His approach was taken up by Bernard Berenson: ‘In a sense,’ Berenson wrote in ‘The Rudiments of Connoisseurship’, barely bothering to paraphrase Morelli, ‘the works of art themselves are the only materials of the student of the history of art.’Giovanni Morelli was born Johannes ...”

“... known as AE) in a Dublin hotel, on the very day which is recorded in Ulysses. Meeting Joyce in Paris in 1924, he tells him: ‘Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library.’ Other celebrities among the great unfictitious dead get similarly rough ...”