“... passing sense of who she was. As each of her affairs in turn went wrong, she moved to a different man. This was a pattern she repeated until late middle age. Then she made do on her own. Angela Carter said of Lulu’s men: ‘Desire does not so much transcend its object as ignore it completely in favour of a fantastic recreation of it.’ Given Olivier’s ...”

“... In Paris, Péret contacted Roussel’s business manager, hoping to arrange a meeting with the man whom Louis Aragon called ‘the President of the Republic of Dreams’. Members of the Surrealist group, including Péret, had consistently championed Roussel’s expensively disastrous confrontations with good taste in Parisian theatres. At a performance of ...”

“... except his supercilious brazen bounciness. Hrabal’s style (or at least how it comes through Paul Wilson’s translation) is similarly freewheeling, exuberant, torrential, full of food and drink and wild scenes in cafés and athletic sexual encounters. Much of it strikes me as being more like what the Germans think of as uproariously funny than we ...”

“... his body was burned) in October 1536. Daniell, like his hero, is an altar-stripper: he writes ‘Paul’ and ‘John’ for ‘St Paul’ and ‘St John’ as others write ‘Austen’ for ‘Jane Austen’. (For some reason Tyndale himself kept the ‘St’ for Matthew, but dropped it for everybody else.) He is that rare ...”

“... letters – which have some of the combative quality of his table talk. But he was a difficult man, in whose life protective colouring and character are hard to distinguish. In a notebook he kept in his twenties he wrote: ‘The heart is an instrument which rusts if it is not used. Without a heart can one be an artist?’ Some who knew him were persuaded ...”

“... zone appeared’. The day before, Carlos Maluje Contreras, a member of the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh), had been arrested. He was interrogated and tortured through the night. He told his captors that he had arranged a rendezvous with another communist for the following day; if they let him keep it they could make a further arrest. Once alone on the ...”

“... that while its secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and its foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, would meet the vice president, they wished to distance themselves from his views. What followed, according to the official Vatican statement, was ‘an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by ...”

“... Front. The Congress of Tours was to launch (though outside the old confines of his party) a man who bravely denounced what was in effect a totalitarian takeover of French Socialism. He was one of the first to understand the extraordinary consistency of the Soviet system which gave the French ‘comrades’ no alternative but to submit or to break ...”

“... In the years before 1914, the open lectures that Henri Bergson gave at the Collège de France were the prototype in intellectual chic for the barnstorming Parisian ‘seminars’ of Jacques Lacan in the Sixties and Seventies, even if the topics that the fashionable came to hear were as dry as the lecturer’s podium manner: ‘The Evolution of Theories of Memory’, ‘Theories of the Will’, ‘The Nature of Mind and Its Relation to Cerebral Activity ...”

“... and disgraced politicians started yapping about ‘trusting the process’. A spectral remittance man in a Paris waiting room, hoping to escape our dying planet, but too soon for Elon Musk, Burroughs recognised Gysin’s breakthrough. The Stanley knife was a viable agent for subverting conditioned reflexes, evading the language police and establishing a ...”

“... search Reddit for ‘Charles Leclerc v. parking his car’.) Someone asked about Ayrton Senna. The man addressing us paused, shook his head: ‘When I remember the first of May 1994 …’ Senna was a special case but the point remained that driving on the public road doesn’t prepare you for trying to handle one of these machines. I’m fairly certain I ...”

“... the poet in him. He ran off and joined the army in 1948; the following year, he eloped with Niki de Saint Phalle, another refugee from the Upper East Side. He returned to university in 1950, this time to Harvard, to complete a degree in music. In 1952, he moved to France with his wife and their infant daughter, Laura.Paris was where Mathews met John ...”

“... were demons, casting Europe into perdition. Thus the fiery gospel of the abbé Barruel and Joseph de Maistre, to which reactionary Catholics and many others held fast throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. For two hundred years, these popular images of the Enlightenment have retained considerable force. Textbooks (including Colin Jones’s superb ...”

“... Zola, writing under a pseudonym, hailed the 25-year-old artist, whom he had yet to meet, as ‘a man in a crowd of eunuchs’. The liberal critic Théophile Thoré (then publishing as William Bürger) contributed to the buzz by reporting that the entire canvas had taken only four days. That wasn’t true; but, like another of his claims for the picture, it ...”

“... all of the books are well worth a first read or a return. The Open Road and Ennemonde are tours de force in their own fashion, and A King Alone is a classic by any standard. A King Alone is the earliest of these three books, first published in France (the place that doesn’t exist) in 1947. The psychological climate of the recent war is everywhere in ...”