“... in a turn of events too clunky for one of her stories – she was reading Voyage au bout de la nuit when a man came up to her and said: ‘Céline, c’est moi.’ They began talking and by the time she arrived in America she had decided she wanted to be a writer.In New York she made herself into what Capote would ...”

“... someone interjects), Francis is recruited by Nada Television to research a European man of letters with a mysterious past and a desperately unconvincing name – Dr Bazlo Criminale. The aim is to produce a series, ‘Great Thinkers in the Age of Glasnost’. Criminale is a Post-Modern novelist, critic, political theorist, and privy adviser to ...”

“... of her often-expressed unhappiness with her identity, and especially her sex. She was born Sibylle de Riquetti de Mirabeau in 1849, but her family decided to call her Gabrielle when she reached13 because she was too plain for a Sibylle. Married in 1869, to become the Comtesse de Martel ...”

“... Voltaire had wished to crush this tedious specimen; Gautier wanted to drown him in eau de vie; and, from the mid-19th century on, venom and violence began to build. Artists and writers led the assault – they were indeed the advance guard – but in certain quarters public scorn mounted too. In the longer term the moderns aimed to discard not ...”

“... a gem does not mind being in a cave and a flower prefers not to be picked; we feel that the man is like the flower, as short-lived, natural and valuable, and this tricks us into feeling that he is better off without opportunities. The sexual suggestion of blush brings in the Christian idea that virginity is good in itself, so that any renunciation is ...”

“... What was Galileo himself trying to do? Was he simply a disinterested investigator of nature, a man of science who found himself involved in theological controversy, more or less by accident? Was he a committed Copernican, as fanatical in his own way as his ecclesiastical opponents? Or was he a devout Catholic with his own ideas about the direction in which ...”

“... It might be depilating ladies’ legs, but more often it was scrubbing their floors. Pavel – now Paul – was put in a Jewish children’s home, where his mother visited him on Sundays. From his point of view, the fall of France improved matters, because his parents carried him off to a small spa near Montluçon in the unoccupied zone. Néris was full of ...”

“... repertory piece; at 25 the three-movement Viola Concerto, premiered at the Proms with the composer Paul Hindemith as soloist; and at 29 the most galvanising of British cantatas, Belshazzar’s Feast. Then came his First Symphony: a structure of such immensity that its almost expressionistic impact alone discharges any debt that Walton is supposed to have ...”

“... Chapter titles in Light, Air and Openness, Paul Overy’s new look at modern architecture between the wars, describe the dream that the style underwrote: ‘The City in the Country’, ‘The House of Health’, ‘Built into the Sun’ and so on.* In the recently restored De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, a rare early example of the international style in England, the Modernist spirit has been so well revived that if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved ...”

“... at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a twilit river, his back turned to a female corpse floating horizontally across the canvas. ‘I don’t believe in psychology,’ Magritte remarked much later, no doubt to forestall facile ...”

“... the West. It was set out, systematically, in a monumental book, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (translated into English in 1966), and, in a wholly different way, in a biography or ‘pathography’ – The Man with a Shattered World (which appeared in English in 1973). Although these books were almost perfect in ...”

“... seriousness; it connected in my mind with its not dissimilar counterpart in France, Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins. Both were concerned, overwhelmingly, with the lives led by thinking women, in and out of politics; both had to do with loyalty, disillusion, the fragmentation of beliefs formerly held to be indissoluble, and the effects of such ...”

“... about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War of Independence. I know it was 152 feet long, weighed 998 tonnes and carried 42 guns. But at the time this replica was created in 1975, I knew only that it was my dad’s ...”

“... province. The first of the two stories called ‘The Angels’ is about laughter, an Ionesco play, Paul Eluard, astrology and fear; and the bad and stupid characters end, in this story, by ascending to heaven. It’s not the puzzle of what this means that catches the attention, but the feat of holding the story together at all. One admires the tour ...”

“... In June 1946 Simone de Beauvoir was 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, on show for the first time after the war. Citizen Kane was also being shown in Paris for the first time, and Beauvoir was impressed: Orson Welles had revolutionised cinema ...”