“... consensus. Impressively bleak though it was, Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), was not of a size or reach to give one to think that he might next go on to write something with the philosophical ambitions of Les Particules élémentaires. The earlier book – now translated under the sadly throwaway title of Whatever ...”

“... quite go away. In this early work – written in the 1940s – Paz is thinking of something like Paul Valéry’s idea of what is ‘given’ in a poem and what is made, what seems to come from a place that is not the writer’s mind, and what is manifestly a matter of craft and labour. ‘The gods give us a certain first line for nothing,’ Valéry ...”

“... Paul Johnson does not, as they say, need much introduction. Whatever one thinks of his opinions, one has to admire his frenetic energy. From 1955 to 1970 he poured forth strong left-wing views in the New Statesman, and since then has moved to pouring forth strong right-wing views in a whole host of publications, books and speeches ...”

“... who will find it significant that Anne Whitmarsh, beginning a careful and detailed study of Simone de Beauvoir with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone ...”

“... life, a few artists tried running with them. Of those who wanted to get their teeth into it Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was among the best. His painter/illustrator bilingualism is relevant to Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril, the exhibition the Courtauld has built round a picture from its own collection. (The exhibition closes on 18 September.) The same subject ...”

“... Natural man is born free but is everywhere in chains. ‘Civilised man’, unfortunately, ‘is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life man is imprisoned by institutions ...”

“... account of his life, with a good deal of information that is not to be found elsewhere. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900, the eldest son of a considerable southern family with offshoots and connections, some of them very grand, all over France. These particular Saint-Exupérys were somewhat reduced (Antoine’s father worked in an insurance ...”

“... it is after all no secret that in the private session of Dail Eireann on 22 December 1921 de Valera endorsed the so-called ‘county option’ – but he points out that de Valera is still invoked as the weightiest support of Republican intransigents. De Valera’s attitudes ...”

“... of Byron’s Letters and Journals, now complete with the publication of an index, brings Byron the man and Byron’s story to the fore. Byron has certainly not emerged from Marchand’s labours as a vulgar careerist: on the contrary, the letters have been acclaimed as letters, the prose as prose, and Byron’s personal charm and intelligence seem harder than ...”

“... of the law, which he exercised freely. He was both an excellent lawyer and the archetypal plain man, with little patience for fools and none at all for knaves. He might have become a reactionary stereotype in his old age, but for two saving graces: a passionate concern for the humble citizen and his freedom, and a remarkable openness of mind. The first ...”

“... creation of the 16th-century Counter-Reformation, formed from the fertile imagination of a man from the Basque country: Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola, whose first name was later universalised into Ignatius, possibly by a tidy-minded clerk at the University of Paris. The Society was the world’s first global ...”

“... auditions held for poetry readings; invitations sent out. The result was a grand gathering. Edward de Souza read some of Shelley’s political poems with tremendous force. The winner of the audition to read ‘Men of England’ was a young black woman. Lesley Saunders, a Greenham Common campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her ...”

“... it explains everything and nothing. Towards the end of the book, he quotes Dr George Moore’s Man and His Motives, published in 1848: The infant no sooner moves its limbs, and feels that they are moved at its will, than it begins to enjoy itself in the use of its own power, for power is evinced only in action, and every action is a certainty – an ...”

“... supporting actor. In a sluggish movie we keep looking at our watch and it seems to have stopped. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is more slow than sluggish but pretty sluggish all the same. Anderson wrote the adaptation himself and clearly loves the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel he is adapting. He follows its plot and quotes from it a good deal. He even ...”

“... literary landscape. But perhaps the requisite mixture of courtesy and curiosity no longer exists? Paul Binding’s Babel Guide to Scandinavian Fiction in Translation describes Söderberg as ‘one of the very greatest Swedish writers, disgracefully little known in the English-speaking world’. The second part of the sentence seems almost to follow from the ...”