“... when the pair were living in Dove Cottage, with William still unmarried, were picked up by De Quincey, and have been used by F.W. Bateson and others as an aid to the critical understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry. But the reader can divine, what Gittings and Manton bring out very well, that Wordsworth’s strong – even unusually strong – sexual ...”

“... distance, full as they are of the rare knowledge he had come to by his reading. In La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the desert-dwelling anchorite of that name – an antisocial paragon to whom Flaubert felt sufficiently drawn to go on writing and rewriting the book for thirty years – endures a punishing series of night-time intrusions from various ...”

“... punch-ups and, of course, in André Breton, a leader. Its proclaimed goal was the liberation of ‘man’ from the chains of the super-ego and of ‘life’ from the constraints of the reality-principle (‘reality’, Breton wrote in one of his many lofty pronouncements, was ‘a miserable mental expedient’). Almost permanently divided within itself, the ...”

“... The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It begins: A man with a limp came towards me begging for money for liquor – spoke of cairns built of skulls, of the wind off the steppes on the night before battle and the evils of cholesterol. In what follows ...”

“... at the studio of the painter Juan Soriano in Mexico City. From there we went walking down Paseo de la Reforma, and he told me he had just been appointed ambassador to India, Ceylon and Pakistan. He had accepted, reluctantly, because of the scant job opportunities in Mexico. Leaving one ‘exotic’ country for another held little appeal, he said, but he ...”

“... Towards the end of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes observed that ‘the myth of the great French writer, the sacred depository of all higher values, has crumbled since the Liberation.’ In Ireland lately there has developed a liberating impulse to desacralise a national institution called YEATS and in a seminal pamphlet, ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’, the country’s most significant and influential critic, Seamus Deane, has criticised the way in which an acceptance of ‘the mystique of Irish-ness’ can involve readers in the ‘spiritual heroics’ of a Yeats or a Pearse ...”

“... peace in the early hours of the morning while playing a drunken game of bicycle polo with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He insisted that behaving this way was his birthright and that he had merely been entertaining those he had woken up. What made all the difference was war and the Guards. All four joined up, keen to do their duty but also to see action; the ...”

“... or cultish overtone. It is just something left behind (literally ‘relinquished’) by the man who once owned it, a man whose life is often felt to be elusive, reticent, difficult to get at, but thanks to Mrs Martin’s lucky find becomes a little less so. A colour photograph of the ring appears on the cover of The ...”

“... time he was wearing a red hat, the very one referred to in the title of a subsequent work, The Man in the Red Hat. During his final year of life he also made a home video, La Pudeur et l’impudeur, which was screened on television a month after his death. Yet another Aids book, Cytomégalovirus, was published at this time and a posthumous novel, Le ...”

“... and was receiving treatment on an island situated some three hundred kilometres south of Rio de Janeiro. Italian journalists claimed to have seen film which revealed Gelli’s friendship with all sorts of powerful international figures: the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More ...”

“... All his life he kept his distance. At readings and concerts he would notice a young man, gaze at him, make his presence felt and understood, and later, in the semi-privacy of his diaries, record the moment. On Sunday morning, 31 October 1920, for example, when he was still working on The Magic Mountain, he went with Katia, his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later ...”

“... were bought any time anyone from the family went to Dublin. My sister became addicted to Jean-Paul Sartre. I remember a book called Words which began ‘I loathe my childhood’; this was an astonishing idea in Enniscorthy at that time. Not long afterwards another sister decided to build a house. There were no architects in Enniscorthy, but lots of ...”

“... 1976 at a lunch hosted by Edgar Faure, the president of the National Assembly, at the Hôtel de Lassay. Michel Foucault had turned down Faure’s invitation as a protest against Giscard’s failure to put an end to the death penalty, and the left-wing figures who went anyway were later subjected, Barthes’s biographer Louis-Jean Calvet reports, to ...”

“... of images, unlike the style of a painter, which is often established by a single picture. One-man shows do the same job, but books do it better. Photographs lose little or nothing in good reproductions, and in a gallery the intimacy of the page is lost. In Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank (Thames and ...”

“... In​ 1957, Albert Memmi published a slender but explosive book, Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur, later translated as The Coloniser and the Colonised. Memmi was a Jew from Tunisia; he was in his late thirties and firmly on the left. At the time of publication, France had entered the fourth year of an undeclared war against nationalist insurgents in Algeria; it had lost its imperial foothold in Indochina in 1954 and was now determined to hang on to its possessions in Africa ...”