“... in 1934, in an essay published in Documents, the journal of the ‘dissident Surrealists’ around Georges Bataille, Magritte made a statement that also applies to many other works: ‘With few exceptions, it is a question of mises-en-scène, which give the illusion of contact with the real, but merely encounter the void.’ This thought leads to his fullest ...”

“... all paid for?’ And when his brother died in Indochina, Mme Simenon grieved thus: ‘What a pity, Georges, that it’s Christian who had to die.’ The residual need to please is sturdy. However, nothing in my personal or professional life pleased my mother as much as when Flaubert’s Parrot was nominated for the Booker Prize and a small photograph of her ...”

“... entourage, the last words about the ‘Algerian Republic’ especially. The Prime Minister, Michel Debré, told Morin that when he had read the text of the speech before it was recorded, the phrase about the ‘Algerian Republic’ had not been there. Debré protested and the General apologised, saying that he had been carried away, that the words had ...”

“... surprisingly sympathetic treatment of the French Communist Party (PCF), and his admiration of Georges Marchais, its proletarian secretary-general from the 1970s to the 1990s. From 1945 until the early 1980s, the PCF was the leading party of the working class, winning 20 to 25 per cent of the vote in most elections. Zemmour, despite his ...”

“... over a boom in sales of contemporary art and went out of their way to protect leading artists: Georges Braque showed 35 works in the Salon d’Automne in 1943, and was offered free coal to heat his vast studio on the rue du Douanier, and Picasso welcomed Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, to his establishment on the rue des Grands-Augustins. It was the ...”

“... he noticed that Sartre had been reading Fin du peuple juif?, by the anti-Zionist Jewish writer Georges Philippe Friedmann. There were other signs of a shift in Sartre’s sympathies. As he left Egypt on 13 March, he gave an interview to the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, in which he promised that ‘one day I will tell you what I think of the Palestine ...”

“... pushing the form – whether it was painting or monotype or even photography. His friend Georges Jeanniot recalled: ‘We were extravagant, all the time etching. We massacred zinc and copper plates. We used the most mysterious tricks and skills, the most unconventional aquatinting.’ And throughout his life Degas was always fighting against received ...”

“... not only with psychoanalytic colleagues but in wider intellectual circles. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Sollers, Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser are all part of Lacan and Co. Like the analysts, each of them had to take a stand for or against Lacan. Lacan would have it no other way. He charged intellectual history ...”

“... She dreamed of shooting a colour feature in Venice with Monica Vitti, but her producer Georges de Beauregard (still high off the success of Godard’s shoestring À bout de souffle) wouldn’t give her more than 32 million francs. Rather than surrender, Varda made whiteness a leitmotif, ‘a sign of [Cléo’s] dissolution into nothingness, a pale ...”

“... stifling world of Charleville. ‘The town of my birth,’ Rimbaud wrote to his teacher and friend Georges Izambard in August 1870 (making him not quite sixteen), ‘is the most supremely idiotic of all provincial towns.’ To get away, too, from the leaden countryside of the Ardennes. In a letter written at the family farm in 1873 he complained to ...”

“... announcement of a referendum on self-determination in Algeria. The party’s long-standing leader, Georges Bidault, joined the paramilitary OAS, which launched armed resistance against de Gaulle in the name of Algérie française and narrowly failed to assassinate him, while his colleagues in the party hewed to de Gaulle. Lecourt, who like Bidault and others ...”

“... to alter the situation. In the summer of 1969, de Gaulle was succeeded by his prime minister, Georges Pompidou, who had played no role in the Resistance and made a postwar career in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of ...”