“... Affair. In a series of interviews conducted with Didier Eribon in the late 1980s and collected in De près et de loin, he spoke of being bullied at school, and of his embattled sense of difference as a member of a national community that didn’t fully accept him. It’s tempting to imagine that this alienation was what led ...”

“... up and ‘that exotic star’ Olga Mara sweeps out, accompanied by her latest husband, the Baron de la Bonnet de la Toulon. Olga walks up the red carpet with a sternly decadent stare, her dress a simulacrum of starlight on a spider’s web. At a party after the screening, the boss of Monumental unveils the first talkie to ...”

“... The celebrated designer instantly cracks up; he is helicoptered without delay out of 55 rue de Babylone to his exquisite château in Normandy and thereafter flown by private jet to his palatial hideaway in Marrakesh, accompanied by his pampered dog and perfect servants. Once there, he locks himself in one room, refuses to eat for weeks, drinks two ...”

“... last arrived at a small valley, on the far ridge of which were some shacks. ‘That,’ said the man who’d brought him on horseback from the river boat, ‘is Nueva Germania.’ Macintyre had come to look for descendants of the Saxons whom Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband had brought there in the 1880s. He put ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ into his ...”

“... has been consistently beloved, with approval ratings above 60 per cent. He is both a dashing man of adventure and a political idealist – the closest thing present-day France has to a Malraux. His reputation even survived his support for the invasion of Iraq. In February, however, the country’s most celebrated investigative journalist published an ...”

“... For Gissing,’ Paul Delany notes, ‘writing was a grim and lonely task, made grimmer by one of the most disastrous family lives of any English writer. At times this misery threatened to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life ...”

“... about the articles he published elsewhere, or his scholarly books, lectures and essays. Defending Paul deMan’s rather slim academic publishing record – his first book, Blindness and Insight, appeared when he was 51 – Kermode says that in view of the density and strangeness of the work, and of its author’s ...”

“... political activists and people old enough to remember the days of the Belgian Congo, including a man who claimed (plausibly) to be 126 years old. Congo, Van Reybrouck insists, is more than the ‘world’s storehouse’: it has ‘played a crucially important role in the tentative definition of an international world order’. In the process the Congolese ...”

“... set up a makeshift classroom under a tree. In 1968, she won a place at the Lycée Notre-Dame de Cîteaux, an elite secondary school for girls in Kigali. She felt she was finally on her way to a place where intelligence mattered more than ethnicity. But ethnic quotas, which stipulated that only 10 per cent of students could be Tutsi, ensured that she was ...”

“... herself, is prefaced by four lines from Hughes’s poem ‘Cross’, published in 1925:My old man died in a fine big house.My ma died in a shack.I wonder where I’m gonna die,Being neither white nor black?Both Larsen and Hughes confronted and dramatised the trope of the ‘tragic mulatto’: Larsen in novels about the upper echelons of Harlem high ...”

“... had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats. Alan Sillitoe. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ‘Belching roar’ is, I think, bloody good (you notice that Sillitoe is writing so plastered that it reads as if it’s the poor old temptation that ...”

“... words were lethal weapons. The Bible didn’t offer much justification for laughter. Saint Paul, for instance, told the Ephesians not to indulge in ‘foolish talking or jesting’. Only the example of Elijah, who taunted the false prophets of Baal, seems to show that, as the 17th-century theologian Isaac Barrow wrote, ‘facetious wit’ was sometimes ...”

“... Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at work. By then, most British bus companies had already agreed to drop the ban on ...”

“... In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang patriotic hymns. One of these, the ‘Marche Lorraine’, has a rousing chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne ...”

“... and self-dramatising misery breaks through – ‘The image he projected of an isolated, depressed man is almost comically contradicted by his diary.’ She writes less persuasively about the poetry, though it has to be said that Thomas’s poetry is unusually difficult to write about, partly because he writes in such ordinary language, with unusual tact and ...”