“... I don’t see why it can’t be both. It does helpfully identify a number of stars in the recent Paris sky, so that Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Blanchot, Greimas and others are all placed in a kind of orbit around Barthes. Lavers is not much taken with what she sees as the temporary mindlessness of Barthes’s next-to-last ...”

“... Badiou and the political theorist Alain Finkielkraut, assembled in the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris to rescue Joan’s memory from the grip of these propagandists, chiefly by recourse to the poet who put the case most fervently for her generosity, tolerance, humanity, and her universalism: Charles Péguy, the socialist utopian and author of the long ...”

“... are just camping out in scarcely-differentiated space. By the time we get to 17th-century Paris, the bourgeois house has four or five floors and an internal courtyard. Cooking has been separated out, and there is greater distinction between servants, tenants and the main family. There may have been panelling and frescoes in the residences of the ...”

“... of these authors, but he did grade them: I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism was ‘good’; Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism ‘very good’. (His sister, Nancy, by contrast, was proving to be ‘mediocre … even typically mediocre’.) And he was training himself to write: poems in German, sketches on nature, plans for ...”

“... sense of accuracy without the mediation of the introspective mind. He is not created. No more than Bernard and Louis, and the characters in The Years and the rest of her novels, is Bogey Harris transformed into a work of art. That is his point, she might reply: that is what I am aiming at. ‘Of course this is external,’ she says, as she meditates the ...”

“... humane and in tune with historical scholarship it was. Per contra, Waugh thought how sensible St Bernard had been in dealing with presumptuous intellectuals such as Abelard. In the last sentences of Decline and Fall there is a reference to the Ebionites – a sect of poor Jewish-Christians who rejected the Pauline Epistles and thought that Jesus was the ...”

“... or ‘pulp modernism’: the modernism not of an international jet-set in New York, Berlin, Paris, but of the sort of people anthemically denoted ‘common’ in the Pulp song (Uncommon, a Zero book by Owen Hatherley which sees Pulp’s singer, Jarvis Cocker, as the last in a line of working and lower-middle-class English ‘art-pop’ visionaries, was ...”

“... leaders often point out, the Shia are less likely to have second passports, or second homes in Paris and London. Whatever their ties to Iran, they are ‘sons of Lebanon’. Nasrallah grew up in a working-class, largely Armenian quarter of Beirut, until his family was expelled by Christian militias at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. They resettled ...”

“... well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events.’ As a boy, he told his friend Bernard De Voto, he had been entirely normal: ‘I wasn’t marked off from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates [sic] and Masters.’ In an interview with Richard Poirier for the Paris Review in 1960, a few years ...”

“... New York intellectuals as well as from the conservative formalism of the New Critics by looking to Paris, where writers were taking what Brennan calls ‘insurgent positions on the politics of culture’. His old mentor Harry Levin tried to check his enthusiasm for French theory, which, as he put it, ‘does not truly aim at the understanding of ...”

“... his horses are painted at home in their stables; and though he curated a great Constable show in Paris in 2003, the greenery he depicted himself lived either in pots or was visible from a studio window. His subject matter was ‘entirely autobiographical’. Verdi once said that ‘to copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is ...”

“... here and there to identify the real-life models for fictional characters. Maugham was born in Paris, where his father was a legal adviser to the British Embassy, and spoke mostly French for the first ten years of his life. His much-loved mother died when he was eight, followed two years later by his father. Maugham, aged ten, was sent back to ...”

“... as well as Gide and Valéry (both of whom he translated into German), Claudel, Cocteau and George Bernard Shaw. Of his contacts with the public figures of his age Leppmann writes: ‘In their ambience he was one of the few people who represented no personal or party interests; who sought no diplomatic, military or economic information and no stock-exchange ...”

“... thing, since Kay was, according to Meyers, still sleeping with her husband, and had affairs with Bernard de Voto and with Lawrance Thompson as well. But Meyers, having secured the story for himself thanks to the co-operation of Morrison’s daughter Anne, has allowed it to skew his biography. Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap ...”

“... rupture, a relation, in short) of which he had never been told, took the line of sending her, from Paris, straight back to her parents – without having touched her – on the ground that he had been deceived. He ended, subsequently, by taking her back into his house to live, but never lived with her as his wife. By the time Lady Gregory told James these ...”