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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter here. By the time he arrived on the island in the 1550s the French privateer François Le Clerc had lost one of his in a naval battle with the British off Guernsey and contrived a wooden replacement: Jambe ...”

“... readers, to whom he had dedicated the book, would consider him ‘a foul-mouthed pimp, a dirty old man’. Yet in his tale of Alibech and Rustico (Day Three, Story Ten), he had instructed girls in a new style of holiness. Deep in the Theban desert, the story goes, a young virgin called Alibech decides to dedicate herself to God. After two holy men send her ...”

“... Vallery Gréard, recounted how he shifted his focus after his more intellectual friend, Paul Chenavard, told him that his portraits of apostles remained inferior to their pictorial models, whereas his depiction of an ordinary young man playing a cello was ‘really personal and most excellent’. Moral: only by ...”

“... published in 1895 when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does. Some rough germ of an idea for the novel had been with Crane for years. As a child he fantasised about war and in his teens he contemplated West Point 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 ...”

“... over some of its functions. Stokes’s chapter on suicide begins with a remarkable letter from a man called Ernest Clark to the editor of the Daily Chronicle. Clark explains that ‘only the transcendental and aesthetic in life are worth our thought,’ and since they are crowded out by ‘the ugliness and vile monotony’ of his existence, he will have shot ...”

“... second volume (like the first) is meticulously edited; the notes themselves provide an embarras de richesses, with enough arcane detail to keep scholars busy for a decade. Over a quarter of the tome is taken up by appendices, biographies, bibliography, and Darwin’s questionnaires, fragments, manuscript alterations and so forth. This series is already ...”

“... was ‘part of Europe’, with ‘the EU on our borders’. Are you with Moscow or Brussels, a man or a girl’s blouse? Or can you be both? These were familiar themes in the election build-up and they’ve persisted. Whoever came to power, it seemed, would want to contrive an enviable dual status for the country a few years from now, cutting manly trade ...”

“... the farmyard animals she had known in Bordeaux, but found some solace in Sunday walks in the Bois de Boulogne, or outings to the Jardin des Plantes, where Raimond was eventually employed as an illustrator by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.Raimond was a dreamer, and rapidly fell under the influence of various utopian socialist sects. The ...”

“... Domènech i Montaner used unadorned brick and industrial iron for his café-restaurant in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to ...”