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“... Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I don’t like to libel him in the pages of my diary, so I will boil down to the minimum all the rumours about him.’ Nicolson, too, met Proust, who appears in one of the pieces in Some People, a rather ...”

“... like Dreyer, Renoir, Bresson, Olmi or Satyajit Ray. Others include less major talents – Vigo, Cocteau, Antonioni, Straub. But how does Lubitsch qualify? Or Sternberg, Hitchcock, Hawks and Orson Welles? Their inclusion seems to me like bracketing Conrad with Edna Ferber or Dashiell Hammett – worthy enough artificers, but not engaged in mature art of the ...”

“... in the act of pinching stuff from parked cars? An incompetent thief, perhaps – which was what Cocteau called Genet, the delinquent in question: ‘You are a bad thief, you get caught. But you are a good writer.’ Genet said much the same thing about himself in a late interview. But then what happens when this incompetent thief writes, as Genet does in ...”

“... photograph of Eileen Gray was taken in 1926 by Berenice Abbott, whose sitters had lately included Cocteau, Gide and Joyce. Gray was 48, but looks younger: her hair is cropped, and she seems to be wearing a tailored suit. It is hard to imagine anybody looking more sleekly tuned to the modern than Gray does here. The perfect profile, the flying-helmet of dark ...”

“... on the galloping horse, Calder would repeat the performance until it did. A film made in 1955 by Jean Painlevé (a DVD is available at Tate) shows the whole thing lasting about forty minutes. Calder pays almost no attention to his audience, who, to judge by the laughter, are mostly children, but remains caught up in what he is doing. What exactly he was ...”

“... enterprise, and some of her new physical nonchalance and social agility were being celebrated by Jean Patou and Lucien Lelong, Alix Grès and several others besides Chanel: but Chanel was certainly the first dressmaker to conceive of female modernity in bodily terms, to insist on a modest but dynamic self-possession as the most attractive note to strike in ...”

“... I was living in Paris in 1959, the year of both Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Budd Boetticher’s The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, and I went to see both of these films the week they were released. In fact, I went back to see them a number of times. I couldn’t help noticing that Godard quoted from another Boetticher movie in the course of Breathless, in the scene where the small-time gangster Michel Poiccard, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, dives into a cinema on the Champs Elysées in order to shake off a wearisome tail ...”

“... In August​ 1943, Jean-Pierre Grumbach, a former soldier in the 71st artillery regiment in Fontainebleau, arrived in London. Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew from Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer his services to the Forces Françaises Combattantes (FFC) – de Gaulle’s Free French. His journey had begun seven months earlier in Marseille, where he had distributed pamphlets for the Resistance under cover of his work in the textile trade ...”

“... he survived with his creative faculties intact.’ He did survive. As Pauline Kael once said of Jean Cocteau, these wiry guys are tougher than they look. At any point after, oh, The Plot against America (2004), a waking, walking nightmare of democracy undone that gained renewed relevance after the election of Trump, Roth might have rung off for ...”

“... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...”

“... some way below the poverty line; and Kylah, who sings in a band called Lemonfinger and loves the Cocteau Twins. This gang are united in their disdain for the fee-paying, university-bound and ‘snobby’ Kay Clarke, and in their determination to have a good time in Edinburgh, where they are due to compete in the national singing finals. The bus is hardly out ...”

“... world. She had also become a Modernist enthusiasm. Among her fans were Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Cocteau and Le Corbusier (he imagined making her the star of a musical production in which she would evolve from monkey to modern woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire caricature ...”

“... and fierce dramatic manipulation by which Eisenstein makes it his own. The sensitive, sprawling Cocteau pauses unexpectedly in their talk, then explains that ‘you suddenly seem to me to be bathed in blood.’ Paul Eluard, Eisenstein’s guest, stands up during the swanky first night of La Voix Humaine to shout Merde! Merde! Merde! and be mobbed – in ...”

“... memoir of the Middle East reads, inappropriately, like a dandified French novel, from the days of Cocteau and Gide, wilful and impressionistic. She is not a professional writer and acknowledges: ‘Paul-Jean Franceschini helped me give my story a shape.’ She was born to a wealthy Syriac Christian family in ...”

“... beach at Étretat in 1907? Debussy and his mistress. One of Jacques’s tutors was the playwright Jean Giraudoux. He took this as normal, though he was never an intellectual, or even much of a reader. His Bois photographs were sometimes likened to Proust, and he happily endorsed the comparison; though he only knew of À la recherche late in life when his ...”