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“... shared arrondissement and their nearness to the Luxembourg Gardens be of particular significance? André Malraux lived in the Rue du Bac – for ever rendered more attractive by the remark made by the exiled Madame de Staël, that it was this street that she missed most of all – whilst Robert Brasillach lived in the more elongated ugliness of the Rue ...”

“... censors and the press. In Britain an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best ...”

“... or a person instead of a work. My work’s never become ‘a Brainard’. Or even a Jainard or a Bernard or a Joe. Here are the last six ‘I remember’s from his sparklingly original and ‘totally great’ (to use one of his own favourite locutions) memoir, I Remember, issued in four instalments between 1970 and 1973, and then collected in a single ...”

“... agitated and in spite of itself, sensitive’. Herriot, meeting her at her château in Saint-Bernard, near Lyon, when she was 66, described watching her draw ‘like a child left in a small room by a hard-working mother’.A few years ago I tried to persuade a curator to put on a Valadon exhibition. Valadon isn’t good enough, she said. What she ...”

“... untimely suggestions in France in 1980. This was the moment of the New Philosophers – led by André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy – and the French were too busy discovering the Gulag to consider the rhizome’s revolutionary potential. In 1972 Deleuze and Guattari were rebels: now they were embarrassing ...”

“... came from. Bobet was from Saint-Méen, near Rennes, Anquetil from Rouen; the present champion, Bernard Hinault, is from the onion country, at If-fignac, in the Côtes du Nord; Darrigade was le Gascon, Poulidor le Limousin, Georges Meunier le Pêcheur de Vierzon, and the hope for the future, Robert Alban, is Bamban le Caladois. Regional races, such as ...”

“... connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.Simone’s father, Bernard Weil, was a successful doctor. Her mother, Selma, had wanted to study medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it. Thoroughly assimilated French Jews, Simone’s parents practised no religion, and didn’t tell their children that they were Jewish until ...”

“... was a journalist and a scholar. In my opinion, his journalism was superior to his scholarship. In André Maurois’s phrase – cited approvingly by Aron himself – ‘Il serait notre Montesquieu s’il consentait à décoller de la réalité’ (‘if he pulled away from reality’). This goes a long way towards identifying what is lacking in his ...”

“... and inward-looking in its collecting habits. In the mid-1960s, cultural diplomacy instigated by André Malraux, then the French minister of culture, brought some of the pictures back to Paris and Bordeaux. Now the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is showing The Shchukin Collection: Icons of Modern Art until 20 February. This ‘top, top’ selection of his ...”

“... English-language prose writers in South Africa, from Olive Schreiner through Nadine Gordimer and André Brink to Mongane Serote, have tried to reconcile these conflicting claims, the claims of history and fiction, by writing in the realist mode. When Coetzee began to write, in the Seventies, he was one of the first South African novelists to act on the ...”

“... to discern degrees of dirt when mud is spattered so liberally but any mention of the name of André Gide – ‘Like a person who has an abscess on his bottom and continuously displays it to the world’ – seems always to have scored highly on Bosie’s venomometer. Gide had dared to remind him what he actually did on holiday with Oscar and himself in ...”

“... for ‘the melting life of fiction’. They see themselves as living in films, like Death Wish fan Bernard Goetz, or John W. Hinckley Jr thinking himself akin to Travis Bickle, the Taxi Driver: here Travis Bickle is the narrator’s son, and Thomson’s chapter on him acutely treats the ambiguous end of Scorsese’s film as a nightmarish, irreversible arrival ...”

“... wearing placard #36’. No effort is spared to make these lists monuments to the actual victims. Bernard Dziubas, pictured in a dark woollen jump suit and wearing knee socks, a great mess of dark locks surrounding his face, was known to have been deported at the age of five but Klarsfeld was not able to find his convoy number. By imagining a phonetic version ...”

“... in her essay, ‘Am I a Snob?’ In the discussion session which followed Williams’s paper, Bernard Sharratt remarked that although the Godwin circle had been repressed it nonetheless had had an influence on Hazlitt, whose critique of Malthus and Ricardo suggested an ‘alternative direction’ that could have been developed further. The Pre-Raphaelites ...”

“... was both old-fashioned and very deaf – had already refused access to several people, including André Maurois, to the papers of ‘poor dear aunt Teresa’. I don’t remember how I persuaded him to change his mind, since it is very difficult to be persuasive or reassuring at the top of one’s voice, but I suspect that he did so not because of anything I ...”