“... But though he moved in artistic metropolitan circles, mixing with Mallarmé, Alphonse Daudet, André Gide and Rodin, Renard only ever had one foot in Paris, and in 1904, following after his father, he was elected mayor of Chitry. His roots, he was always eager to stress, were ‘still covered in earth’. Missing in the photographs is his hair colour. In ...”

“... until recently, in French translation.*She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills … scooping up handfuls of the green money and dropping it on top of her head so that it came sliding down along the cream-coloured hair, slipping down along her shoulders and body. She was making a noise I never ...”

“... creative decade commuting between bohemian Surrealist Paris, dominated by its belligerent pontiff, André Breton, and his parents’ comfortable bourgeois home in Teddington. Like Herbert Read, he became an English go-between for French Surrealism and readers in Britain. He translated Dali, Péret, Eluard and Breton and wrote commentaries – such as A Short ...”

“... meeting near the fin de siecle in which Wilde, holding Bosie’s hand, boasted before a timid André Gide of having put all his genius into his life (looking at Bosie) but only his talent (looking at Gide) into his writing – and in the same bad breath told Gide, a prim and puritanical pederast, that there was an Arab boy he shouldn’t miss au poil for ...”

“... what in the 21st and 22nd centuries (‘Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. André Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071. Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059’). This narrator, who first appears and tells a piece of her story in The Savage Detectives, is tempted to ...”

“... he recorded countless sunsets disappearing into the sea in the hope of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination. But when it came to shooting he abandoned himself to the moment. In 24 ...”

“... That’s what I said.Who said, ‘Ay, mum’s the word’?      Sexton to willow:Who said, ‘Green dusk for dreams,      Moss for a pillow’?Who said, ‘All Time’s delight      Hath she for narrow bed;Life’s troubled bubble broken’?      That’s what I said.This poem was included in the tribute volume presented to Thomas Hardy in ...”

“... castration anxieties produced by the viragos of the Terror. Last year, pictured in Vogue wearing a green carnation and top hat, Galliano showed a collection for Dior based on images of the decadent French aristocracy. One model, described as ‘wind-up courtesan’, was an elaborate Marie Antoinette doll, with a powdered face, a huge white yarn wig topped with ...”

“... painter of themes. Themes, not subjects or ‘subject matter’: he pointed out the difference to André Malraux in 1937, just before Guernica left his studio for the Paris World’s Fair. Malraux had remarked that though neither of them put much stock in ‘subject matter’, on this occasion, in painting the great mural, his subject had served Picasso well ...”

“... the US to train as a parachutist. In 1947, he joined the journal Esprit, where he met Resnais and André Bazin. He took swiftly to film, and from the outset his documentaries – Olympia 52, Dimanche à Pékin, Les Statues meurent aussi and Lettre de Sibérie – were self-reflexive and had political undertones. It was Bazin who credited Marker with the ...”

“... just before the outbreak of the Second World War; purchases resumed in 1941, in New York, with André Breton, Howard Putzel and Max Ernst also advising. The catalogue of Guggenheim’s collection, Art of This Century, published in that year, amounted to an ‘anthology of modern art’ – that is, a sourcebook of approved models of thirty years of ...”

“... with a style of walking ‘somewhere between a mince and a swagger’. He is observed by André Gide in 1895, ‘greedily eating little vanilla ice creams’ at the Caffè Gambrinus in Florence. Gide reports: ‘He speaks with a clear voice, rather icy but soft and wheedling. His glance is quite cold: perhaps he is cruel, or perhaps it is his refined ...”

“... of rivers and landscapes, and in the ingenious visual articulation of acts of memory. The water is green and blue, the autumn countryside a burnt orange, and remembering is pictured by large hooded eyes superimposed on a path, on a bedroom, on flowers in blossom, and at one point on a whole host of instances not named in this volume but only much later in A la ...”

“... when Truman Capote appeared on his tail, and was infuriated when Capote professed an intimacy with André Gide greater than his own – though this proved to be Capote’s embellishment, proof for Vidal that embellishment was what Capote was best at. Nor was he tremendously happy when Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead. He caught up, and in the ...”

“... to fighting ‘the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements’); André Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting ‘universal Jihad’, Iranian ‘lust for power’ and radical Islam’s strategy of ‘green subversion’. All three ...”