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“... age!’ someone exclaims. You think Kundera may be onto something here. But Ramon, Charles, Alain, the female navel, the ‘Pakistani’ waiter, Kalinin and his prostate problem, a very old bottle of Armagnac falling off a cupboard and smashing, a story of a hunting exploit of Stalin’s, someone’s mother falling ill? They all seem like seconds, and ...”

“... the more avant-garde forms of narrative that once aspired to kill the linear off. The premise of Alain Robbe-Grillet and other New Novelists these many years ago was that stories which advance so sure-footedly from launch-pad to dénouement have had their day, belonging from now on only in the consciousness-lowering darkness of the movie-house, where the ...”

“... admiration that had fallen to Handke over the course of his career had disappeared into thin air. Alain Finkielkraut called him an ‘ideological monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in ...”

“... act was as intimate and warm as the act of sex.’ In 1981, in a letter to his French translator, Alain Delahaye, McGahern describes laying out the brother of a neighbour in the company of a chemist from Dublin who kept adjusting the mouth: ‘I knew this pursuit of perfection could go on all night. The murmurs outside the door were rising, people restless to ...”

“... far from family romance. Indeed, in the final chapters of the saga, Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, was put in the place of dauphin, much as Freud had made his daughter Anna his Antigone. Miller’s struggle for the succession brought to the surface the complex and self-contradictory nature of psychoanalysis as a family affair, its members united ...”

“... could show erotic scenes ‘unimaginable in public art or publicly displayed liturgical texts’. Alain Bourea traces the various uses of hagiography. The book of a saint’s life could be a magical charm as well as a service book and a subject for meditation. Printing allowed such adjuncts of piety to be used as weapons in power struggles, something ...”

“... as well as conscious ones. Yet French historians, with the exception of the Russian specialist Alain Besançon, have been rather unwilling to come to terms with Freud. Stone, on the other hand, like some of his American colleagues, is willing to grasp the nettle of ‘psychohistory’. ‘It must be admitted,’ he confesses, ‘that Freudian psychology ...”

“... over an armature of remembered misquotation’), he mentions his surprise at being compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponge by reviewers of his first two books. It’s easy to see how they got there: The Mezzanine – Howie’s footnote-strewn account of a morning at his anonymous corporate workplace, defamiliarised by intricate descriptions of ...”

“... tale, its role is to suggest the narrative transports of fantasy itself. Warner follows Philippe-Alain Michaud in making out a deep affinity between the flying carpet and the cinema screen. And, in a superb coup de théâtre in the final chapter of the book, she places Freud’s couch in the tradition of the flying beds and enrapturing sofas that throng The ...”

“... by an extreme, heartrending, passionate quality in her character,’ he told his biographer, Alain Elkann. ‘It was as if every day of her life were the last.’ For a few years, Elsa and Alberto lived in suspension, as though Fascism, war, the racial laws weren’t happening: ‘Elsa walked around with a Siamese cat on a leash and I had an owl on my ...”

“... Greenberg called ‘the Tenth Street touch’ – ‘had become a kind of creed.’* Worse, in Yve-Alain Bois’s assessment in that book, de Kooning is the exponent of a reactionary adaptation of his friend and rival Jackson Pollock’s truly revolutionary technical innovations, indeed ‘a kiss of death: gone were the looseness and risk-taking of the drip ...”

“... his early life). Without glasses, he could pass for a French movie star, a mix of Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. A witty local anti-semite called him der schön Jude. His English is forceful, strongly accented but clear. There are only occasional mispronunciations, some of them amusing, a hard-g’d ‘mangy’, a confusion between ‘annul’ and ...”

“... Celan’s language in the poem comes close to that in his translation of Jean Cayrol’s text for Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, a documentary about Auschwitz. But we are missing one of the main events. Or I was, until I saw in the notes that Celan is quoted several times as saying the poem is about ‘the ravages of the atomic bomb’, about ‘atomic ...”

“... a lot of familiar figures crop up in the narrative. After coaching, Sarfati is ‘perfect’ with Alain Badiou, ‘impeccable with Greta Thunberg and frankly majestic with Zemmour’. There are sly side-swipes for the benefit of insiders, as when someone asks innocently – about the former editor of Libération – ‘Isn’t Laurent Joffrin ...”

“... the problems of the day on any chat show that would have him. Fellini visited the Marvel office. Alain Resnais proposed a collaboration.Goodman, who made it clear that he felt comics ‘were only really read by very, very young children or stupid adults’, was happy for Lee to have his moment. Kirby, a gruff workaholic, and Ditko, a touchy introvert, were ...”