“... in Paris. It was there, decades later, that The Little Sister was published alongside Hammett and Georges Simenon in the Série Noire that gave film noir its name. French homages to noir – the Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Paul Belmondo Breathless, made the year Chandler died, and the François Truffaut/Charles Aznavour Shoot the Pianist – fulfilled the form ...”

“... accounts of Freud’s behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have ...”

“... Simenon was not a man to do things by halves. He moved house 33 times, wrote 193 novels under his own name and more than two hundred under 18 pseudonyms, produced 27 volumes of autobiography and at 74 claimed to have slept with ten thousand women, eight thousand of whom were prostitutes (his second wife later smallmindedly reduced the total to 1200 ...”

“... was fantastically large and wide, in other countries as well as in other media; it runs as far as Georges Simenon saying ‘he invented us all,’ ‘he began it all’). But Coleridge ‘began’ Scott. The issue has long been suspected, and is fully dealt with in John Sutherland’s Life of Scott. ‘Christabel’ was known long before it was ...”

“... that. Only a very few occasions allowed John to lower his guard. The death in Auschwitz of Georges Perec’s mother elicits a hint of sentimentality, but time spent in the Gulag is no excuse for sloppy thinking and, as John puts it, Andrei Sakharov’s discussion of Derrida isn’t ‘guaranteed to be totally coherent by his courage in resisting ...”

“... Carolyn Dean comes within three italic characters of making the volume’s one joke, when she has Georges Bataille dismissing Sade’s new-found admirers as ‘con artists’). Of the women writers for whom admission to the canon is demanded, one, George Sand, has surely never been dropped from it, but another, the late 18th-century novelist, Isabelle de ...”

“... credits: a device, as André Bazin noted, that Robert Bresson borrowed for his 1951 adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Melville’s early films were bookish, and rather talky. But in the early 1960s he began to hone back his dialogue. The first seven minutes of Le Samouraï (1967), in which Alain Delon plays the hitman Jef ...”

“... often the (male) writer’s mother, isn’t it? Although none of them can compare to Simenon’s punitive mother, who, at the height of his fame and wealth, returned to him all the money he had sent her over the preceding forty years. Staying in his palatial house, she would stop the maids and ask them suspiciously: ‘Is it all paid for?’ And ...”