“... gangster. Several of Campbell’s principals – Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Jérôme Lindon, Maurice Girodias – also turn up in Lennon’s story, like Balzac’s recurring characters or, less charitably, like figures in some bizarre soap opera. Naturally, the principal locale is the café or the bar, notably the Deux Magots, the Closerie des Lilas, the ...”

“... can be a mess, but there is a form of intellectual freedom in the chance of these slippages. Maurice Nadeau, introducing Barthes as a new contributor to the magazine Combat, said he was ‘fanatical about language’, and as Samoyault shows, this zeal took many forms. He was sometimes afraid of language, especially in its spoken versions, and he didn’t ...”

“... nursery of the French political élite: alongside Mendès in LAURS were to be found Léo Hamon, Maurice Schuman, Léopold Senghor, Jacques Soustelle and Georges Pompidou (then a militant young socialist). Already Mendès had joined Herriot’s Radicals and was determined on a political future – ‘dreaming of a career like Disraeli’s’. Even in such a ...”

“... writer’s block to the influence of a voodoo doll staring at him from his study shelf), was keen on astrology and went in for séances. In these terms, Surrealism is one of the chapters in the prolonged ‘trial of the Enlightenment’, a moment in the essentially rearguard action to re-enchant the disenchanted world. Although it saw itself as the ...”

“... Communists does not, however, mean that he worked for them. On the contrary, he seems to have been keen on countering Communist defeatism during the Battle of France. If Moulin had broken with the Party, would supporters of the Party have had reason to betray him? Again the evidence is slim. In 1943 the Soviet Union was fighting a war for survival. Its agents ...”

“... going to war? It’s Hitler! … He is on the side of Life’). Even the Vichy regime wasn’t too keen on him. The couple went to Germany, then to Denmark, where Céline was charged (from Paris) with treason, and spent just under a year in jail. His trial in Paris began in 1950. He was found guilty then amnestied in 1951. He and Lucette returned to France ...”

“... on one occasion in his youth he was taken and nearly ition carried on by his descendants; and a keen rider to hounds, which did not mean the family were considered to be of the gentry class: in Ireland as in England possession of a horse was all that was needed to follow the local hunt. He bequeathed to later Joyces a hunting waistcoat embroidered with ...”

“... celebrated the triumph of this conviction. With essays by Derrida, Etienne Balibar, Luce Irigaray, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze, this book both established the distinctly French provenance of the dead-subject argument and, in characteristically French fashion, ‘put into question’ that argument itself by implying that another ...”

“... modification of insanity’, he called it) expressly tailored to the needs of wealthy families keen to deprive relatives who were troublesome, but not insane by the usual criteria, of their civil rights in order to spare the family from ruin or infamy. One noted alienist, John Haslam, hinted at an affinity between respect for property and ...”

“... pour l’échafaud, 1957, the elegant pain of Miles Davis’s music in the soundtrack; of Maurice Ronet, trapped in a lift for the duration of the same film; of the frozen, bewildered lovers in Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, 1959, and L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961; of the boy staring at the ocean at the end of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent ...”

“... Africa that seemed to me better suited than Yonda to accommodate him. To tell the truth, I was not keen to have such a visitor. In spite of Yonda’s relative remoteness, it was on its way to becoming if not a tourist attraction, at least a showpiece. I was also apprehensive that our guest, a famous Catholic writer, might upset the delicate balance between ...”

“... would later suggest his action was nonetheless a ‘breach of faith’. Perutz also knew that Maurice Wilkins, who worked alongside Franklin at King’s, had shown Watson a new X-ray photograph of DNA that Franklin had taken. Perutz understood how important this photograph had been in Watson’s reasoning about the structure of DNA. When Watson and Crick ...”

“... in a style and on subjects he might find interesting, a fitting tribute to a historian who has a keen eye for popular amusements and pastimes (from gambling to dancing to trade unionism) and the wit to take them seriously. Some familiar themes emerge. McKibbin, like Stedman Jones and Joyce, wanted to understand the relative fragility of socialism and the ...”

“... to odd thoughts, close descriptions of minutiae and masturbation scenarios. His narrators read Maurice Baring, A.C. Benson, Hopkins, Swinburne and Iris Murdoch. In Room Temperature, Mike takes a copy of Mark Pattison’s Isaac Casaubon to read on a plane; in the novel’s closing sentence he picks up a copy of the TLS. And on top of being a great observer ...”

“... and food. It was the sort of life you could lead only if you had looks: and ‘Mrs Connolly,’ Maurice Bowra wrote to Ann Fleming, ‘is plainly a cup of tea at a high level.’ It isn’t easy to tell from the photograph on this page why she was thought to be such a catch, but she wouldn’t have pulled that face if she hadn’t thought she had ...”