“... Jean Cocteau​ had a genius for being seen. As an elegant young man, with the cult poet Anna de Noailles on his arm, thanks to an introduction from Proust, he danced the polka at the Bastille Day ball in 1912, careful, first, to alert the photographers. ‘If I were to take a picture of a village wedding,’ a photographer once remarked, ‘Jean Cocteau would appear between the bride and groom ...”

“... for the boxes, selling them for $100 or even $50 just to get rid of them.’ Interviewed by Jean Stein for Edie: An American Biography (1982), Jasper Johns said:I liked Andy’s Brillo boxes – the dumbness of the relationship of the thought to technology – to have someone make those dumb plywood boxes and then paint them. I mean, artists have ...”

“... Abu Omar. (He was killed in mysterious circumstances in 1976.) Mikhaïl in turn introduced him to Jean Genet, ‘a very strange bird given to long scary silences’.While in Beirut, Said immersed himself in the work of Ibn Khaldun, whose 1377 study of history, the Muqaddimah, became nearly as important to him as Vico’s New Science, and received his ...”

“... and to Gaby Bloch, companion-cum-manager of the dancer Loie Fuller. She knew and admired Gertrude Stein, but mostly steered clear of her salon; she tended to mock the coterie around Djuna Barnes, with their white gloves and martinis at the Flore; and seems to have spent her spare time elegantly bowing out of romantic entanglements and avoiding glamorous or ...”

“... boys, misspent youth) and when the cab stopped we had a sort of hug right there in the road.Jean Stein, the editor and writer who was hosting the supper, went on to talk about Quintana after I went back inside. ‘You know something?’ she said, twisting a hand in the air. ‘She would only read one book. Again and again she read it. My book about ...”

“... of being able to consult many surviving friends of Ford, including Allen Tate, Herbert Read, Jean Rhys and Rebecca West. He also had access to the papers of Ford’s mistress Violet Hunt and the Ford collections in various American libraries, notably those of Cornell and Princeton. Judd and Saunders were denied by death of useful contemporary ...”

“... a cultural journalist at Libération; her long-term lover, a married media academic called Jean-Michel Leibowitz; her friend Dominique Rossi, a gay activist; and William Miller, an unbalanced young man who is Dominique’s lover for a time and then spends the rest of his life trying to destroy him. William’s behaviour drives much of the plot, as he ...”

“... On a hot​ day in August 1806, Jean-Honoré Fragonard stepped into a café near the Champs de Mars to eat an ice cream, collapsed, and died later that day of ‘cerebral congestion’. He was 74 and by this time virtually unknown – a few lines in the daily papers were the only acknowledgment of his death. As an artist, Fragonard had often been at odds with the culture of his day ...”

“... that a very innovative form was necessary to express them.’ She should, like Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, have experimented with form and language. I am not sure that this is so. The wild excesses of the novels flourish while, in the background, day-to-day realism plods on. That is their strength. As for her life with Caroline, Mazo considered ...”

“... places: you would never have caught her going up the Amazon or into the jungle like her aunt Jean Liedloff, who wrote The Continuum Concept, a book about child-rearing based on her experiences with a Stone Age Indian tribe in the Venezuelan jungle, and kept an ant-eater in her flat in Primrose Hill. Having trapped you in some rented house or her own loft ...”

“... work consists of such paintings as La Toilette, the Two Brothers and the portrait of Gertrude Stein which date from shortly before the invention of Cubism, and some of the drawings he made in 1918 (The Bathers, for example, in the Fogg Art Gallery) and in the early Twenties (the mother and child at present on exhibition at the Royal Academy) – together ...”

“... cry. At nightfall in this quarry a few kilometres outside Avignon, Peter Brook’s staging of Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of The Mahabharata begins. Wisdom-book and story-repository, fifteen times the size of the Bible, The Mahabharata was written in Sanskrit, but the words you hear are French, spoken with a piquant diversity of accents matching ...”

“... by the Beinecke Library at Yale, assuring them a place alongside those of Pound, Marinetti and Stein; a short story has recently been published in the New Yorker and a late essay on Bloomsbury appeared in the April number of Modernism/Modernity. Born in 1890, Mary Butts grew up at Salterns, the family house in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Isaac ...”

“... that was bad enough. But he turned out to be so lacking in painterly flair that Gertrude Stein, in her un-Delphic way, told him not to give up the day job – he would do well to join the family business. (Some of his early canvases have been included in the show to prove her point.) Though he switched to photography, he always said he was more ...”

“... voice became language in my heart. That was happiness.’ His favourite book was Jean-Henri Fabre’s 19th-century entomological notes and drawings; he collected insects and watched birds; he wrote poems in the sand with a twig, poems with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he ...”