“... with Grand Duke Dmitri, Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster among others, the friendships with Colette and Cocteau and Diaghilev among others, the parties and dinners in great houses, the passionate attachment to Misia Sert, the passionate aversion to Schiaparelli and other rivals, the whole decorative panoply of Chanel’s intense connection with ...”

“... simple little braided suits, her last style, with which her name is indissolubly associated. Colette, in 1932, described Chanel’s solitary rages of creation, pulling, slashing, discarding, muttering a monologue in which no one dared to join. Twenty-two years later, her revenge – and it was seen as a revenge – was absolute, and she was finally ...”

“... 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands may flatten against both cheeks (Lily Brik-Mayakovsky, 1954), interlock over the belly (Harold Macmillan, 1967), rise above the head to twist the hair ...”

“... himself on the European music hall circuit, where he specialised in sporting impressions. Colette, who saw him perform in 1936, wrote admiringly of his centaur-like ability to play the parts at once of cyclist and cycle, tennis player and racket. But Tati understood, as he approached forty, that success on the stage was not going to be enough, in the ...”

“... and quotations that suggest high standards (Mann, Conrad, Forster, Shakespeare, both Eliots, Colette, Dante, James, Ibsen, Shaw, Proust, Shelley, Burke, Milton) her sentences are generally lethargic. Here’s some of Sylvie’s back story: ‘They sank into genteel and well-mannered poverty. Sylvie’s mother grew pale and uninteresting, larks soared no ...”

“... focus of her final books. The Way out of Berkeley Square is a novel about the family and – as Colette did to Sido in Claudine at School – she has done away with the mother. Arabella is instead raised by a despotic, pettifogging father:When he rests his gloved hand on my shoulder it’s unaccountably heavy, really heavy, like a small leather dog, and ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield etc), and to a certain extent published translations for French fiction (Colette but not always Balzac), and for medical literature (Stekel’s Frigidity in Woman is quoted correctly), and sometimes, but not always, for philosophy. Some quotations from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit are taken from published translations, but, as we ...”

“... would only work for a narrow spectrum of figures. For real fatness, there was no cure. Of Colette (one of only two women writers she tolerated, the other being Madame de Noailles) she wrote, point blank, that ‘she is wrong to allow herself to get fat.’ Needless to say, Chanel’s tyrannical side doesn’t make it into the movie. The credits ...”

“... as a triumph of feminism. She told the académiciens in their Napoleonic era uniforms that Colette, George Sand, Madame de Staёl and the salonnières could have preceded her, and the fact they hadn’t wasn’t a consequence of the misogyny of their institution, but of the way it followed the manners of the time, which ‘placed woman on a ...”

“... read the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, Brennan took back, without a word, a favourite portrait of Colette that she had hung behind his desk. Later, visiting London, she was ‘outraged’ to find that the only available map of the city was ‘the one with the “Bastion of Liberty” on it’. (‘Blood tells,’ she wrote.) Did Brennan keep writing about her ...”

“... hailed in a copy of La Poussière de soleils as a ‘modern Julius Caesar’ – Proust, Colette, Robert Desnos, Pierre Loti ‘dont on ne doit prononcer le nom qu’à genoux’), self-promoting publicity handouts, details of his extravagant theatrical ventures, press clippings describing his roulotte, a luxury caravan he had custom-built and of ...”

“... in The Wings of the Dove. He cooled the cruelty of it by intellectualising its moral problem. Colette could take any amount of cruelty on the chin and in her hard-bitten way grin at it like a mauled boxer. With E. Bowen cheerfulness keeps breaking in. Precisely one-third of The Death of the Heart removes Portia from NW1 by sending Anna and Thomas away for ...”

“... grand old man. Fauré brought his bright young pupil Ravel. Debussy was there. So was Colette, sporting a waist nearly as enticing as Misia’s, which was saying a great deal. At a party thrown by Misia’s brother-in-law to celebrate the completion of nine large panels by Vuillard, Lautrec was the barman. Three hundred people were present, of ...”

“... assignment.But she did it, and then wrote about some celebrities – Dietrich, Maillol, Astaire, Colette, who was amused to find Cocteau’s moving statue turned into a soldier – before being sent to Luxembourg to cover the fighting. There she was delighted to find her beloved 83rd Division from St Malo, who had declared her AWOL when she left them; and ...”

“... a continuation of politics by other means. To remain as interested intrinsically in sex as Colette was all her life long, and as Mrs Hutchins continues to be, requires an almost monastic single-mindedness. Now some of the coquettishness here – s-e-x – is simply that of the time and place. As late as 1964, as the nervous joking reminds us, many of ...”