“... a number of abstract painters and sculptors, widened to include younger artists and writers. John Bernard Myers, director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, began to refer to a ‘New York School of Poets’ (which happened to be those whose work his gallery had published). As the 1950s progressed, Hartigan’s coterie became well known and visible. In 1954, for ...”

“... to doff his hat for an empress; and above all a series of fictional characters in contemporary Paris, Agnes and Paul, Agnes’s sister Laura and her lover Bernard, a fashionable and insecure radio interviewer, Agnes’s lover Rubens, whose nickname mocks his abandoned artistic ambitions. The central and most interesting ...”

“... out. Hearing that the young James Joyce is about to soar on his Icarus-like wings from Dublin to Paris, Yeats writes him a kindly note on the advice of Lady Gregory, treats him to breakfast during his London stopover and offers to march him around the odd literary editor. It is a characteristically courteous gesture on Yeats’s part, and an unwittingly ...”

“... safe bet, particularly when France unexpectedly recognised the Transitional National Council after Bernard-Henri Lévy persuaded Sarkozy to act quickly. Only a few years before, Sarkozy had given Gaddafi a warm welcome in Paris and, when criticised for it, pointed in his defence to Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear ...”

“... who wouldn’t? More often, however, because she could not think consecutively, as George Bernard Shaw maintained, for more than 60 seconds at a time, she was the interrupter not the interrupted; she once congratulated herself to her dinner guests: ‘I got in a wonderful interruption tonight.’ Nancy Astor was a bundle of contradictions as well as ...”

“... race is restaged. Suffragettes and striking servants vie for Saki’s scorn with the teachings of Bernard Shaw. Here is a sketch of a rich grande dame of a type not, perhaps, wholly extinct: Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage ... When she inveighed eloquently against the evils of capitalism at ...”

“... Siena really think of her notorious (and fatal) anorexia as a ‘philosophy of wellness’? Could Bernard of Clairvaux, whose Sermons on the Song of Songs were the medieval playbook for divine eros, have become a predatory priest ‘in another life’? Apropos of avarice, Jones presents an extraordinary vignette. Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali from 1312 to ...”

“... that the anti-totalitarian front fell apart. The first skirmish occurred in the early 1980s, when Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that there was a generic French ideology, stretching from left to right across the 20th century, saturating the nation with anti-semitism and cryptofascism. This was too much for Le Débat, which demolished Lévy’s blunders and ...”

“... the evidence. On 13 November 2015, when terrorists massacred ninety people at the Bataclan in Paris, Captagon was immediately suspected. To Professor Jean-Pol Tassin, an addiction specialist at Inserm, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, the killers’ ‘empty expressions, their determination, their mechanical movements’ all ...”

“... According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy considered making Walter Lippmann his ambassador to Paris, but Schlesinger told the president he was more useful in the papers. When Lippmann visited the Oval Office on 8 November 1962, Ronald Steel tells us in Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980), Kennedy tried hard to make him feel important. He ...”

“... who did the same thing when he was supposedly under the moral protection of his grandfather in Paris twenty years later. No strait laces about the Franklins, though the biographers seem a little reluctant to point out the coincidence. Franklin himself admitted in his Autobiography that the ‘hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently ...”

“... were hopeful guesswork. Finally, they were never quite sure what their masters in London and Paris wanted from them. The politicians were desperately anxious not to be seen to be involved, and they also suspected that the Bolsheviks had broken their codes. Direct communication with their men ‘in the field’ amounted to mutters out of the corner of the ...”

“... recognises certain sharers of her aims: among literary critics, Wayne Booth; among philosophers, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell; among social scientists, Amartya Sen. Nussbaum explains her discovery of virtues eloquently, volubly, in the manner of a belated Victorian moralist. The reverse of a dry writer, she is fairly often deeply moved, and you come ...”

“... He is not a son of . . . He didn’t go to Sciences Po or a business school,’ the manager of a Paris cinema told me. ‘He’s not a technocrat. His schooling was the cinema.’ In Sélection officielle, Frémaux remembers suiting up (as is obligatory) as a young man to sit in the worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film ...”

“... or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative years, according to this biography, were haunted by ‘the dark counterpoint of constant, brooding ...”