“... 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 ...”

“... her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her posthumous works, and then by Kegan Paul in 1879. Ingpen wrote of her life and sufferings tenderly: ‘Pathetic and lonely, she stands out in the faint mists of the past, a woman that will continue to evoke sympathy when her books are no longer read.’ Evidently he had no doubt of their ceasing to ...”

“... he was careful to keep them well apart. Nothing Wilde wrote is directly autobiographical except De Profundis. Gide, on the other hand, published his indiscreet journals in instalments throughout his long life, brought out his tell-all autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, in 1926, and left a short confession about his marriage, Et nunc manet in te, which he ...”

“... of the last three years’, but also elicited the first of several fine appreciations from Walter de la Mare, who was not only aware of Eastaway’s real identity, but knew of his death just three weeks earlier. De la Mare described the poems as ‘final and isolated’, while also pinpointing ‘a kind of endlessness in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”