“... child’s confession. Probably the first of these to appear was The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554. Lazarillo is an orphan boy who faces starvation in the hard streets of Salamanca. His first master, a blind man, beats him and wrenches open his jaws to smell whether he has eaten the last piece of ...”

“... on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit missionary, but behaved in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was committed to an asylum. In 1726 he was shipped back home ...”

“... a subject imbued with great significance. In its predecessor, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), a man and a boy arrive in an unnamed country, in a city called Novilla. They have travelled there from across the sea, via a ‘camp’ in the desert, where they have learned Spanish and been assigned new names: Simón and David. The ...”

“... enjoyable new history of the Protectorate, which collapsed nine months after Cromwell’s death, Paul Lay is bracing and undeceived in his judgments. He is the editor of History Today, and he writes in the best tradition of that magazine, accessible but sound in detail, with an alert eye for the significant details academic historians sometimes slide ...”

“... Film Institute to improve the minds of Hollywood hotshots. He was in a class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader.Something in him was set on making movies, though years later he would also adapt the Kenji Mizoguchi film Sansho the Bailiff (1954) for the stage. In addition, and almost to demonstrate his caring and not caring, he wrote an early draft of what ...”

“... and his first portrait of the author ‘was described by the critics as like that of a drowned man, taken out of the water’. Sickert’s portrait was likened to ‘an intoxicated mummy, a boorish goat’. Moore, entering into the spirit of the game, said Jacques-Emile Blanche made him look like a drunken cabby. Additional insults are to be gleaned from ...”

“... Almost​ from the moment she published The Second Sex in November 1949, Simone de Beauvoir was asked why she’d never written a female character who lived a free life, the sort she imagined in her final chapter, ‘The Independent Woman’. If the mother of 20th-century feminism couldn’t imagine a free woman, who could? At first she would answer brusquely ...”

“... with her own self, or non-self, as a male dream preserve, the woman’s refuge might be, as St Paul said, in silence. And, ironically, it is the most ‘sensitive’ males who could be, in this context, the most exasperating. Feminism is surely right to be particularly resentful of male attempts to create, in however full a degree of sympathy, the ...”

“... use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de Charlus and his newest heart-throb, Jupien. In biology, a tropism is the instinctive movement that occurs when an organism responds to an outside stimulus: the often microscopic reorientation by ...”

“... was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to cover the ...”

“... the story, which will be deeply felt by all those who knew this gentle, reflective and withdrawn man. It was, of course, inevitable that popular newspapers should have sought to add scandal to sensation as soon as the news was known. It was claimed that when he summoned the doctor of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (where he lived) on the morning of Sunday, 16 ...”

“... recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus ...”

“... In ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’, a long piece for Esquire in 1959, Simone de Beauvoir considered her ‘an export product as important as Renault automobiles’. Yet the French were in two minds about her. As the millennium approached, her celebrity remained ambiguous in a country that had changed enormously since she first ...”

“... circumscribed by the simultaneous eclipse of the British Empire and of the idea of the leisured man of letters. Nor are matters helped by such vulgar difficulties as the need to pay tradesmen, the need to keep up an appearance of sexual continence and the need to maintain a steady flow of copy. In the Raven world, yin and yang consist of a permanent ...”

“... to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves. Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards ...”