“... and fierce dramatic manipulation by which Eisenstein makes it his own. The sensitive, sprawling Cocteau pauses unexpectedly in their talk, then explains that ‘you suddenly seem to me to be bathed in blood.’ Paul Eluard, Eisenstein’s guest, stands up during the swanky first night of La Voix Humaine to shout Merde! Merde! Merde! and be mobbed – in ...”

“... beach at Étretat in 1907? Debussy and his mistress. One of Jacques’s tutors was the playwright Jean Giraudoux. He took this as normal, though he was never an intellectual, or even much of a reader. His Bois photographs were sometimes likened to Proust, and he happily endorsed the comparison; though he only knew of À la recherche late in life when his ...”

“... memoir of the Middle East reads, inappropriately, like a dandified French novel, from the days of Cocteau and Gide, wilful and impressionistic. She is not a professional writer and acknowledges: ‘Paul-Jean Franceschini helped me give my story a shape.’ She was born to a wealthy Syriac Christian family in ...”

“... after all, that made a series out of Tales of the City, that featured my own biography of Jean Genet on a South Bank Show and did a filmed version of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; now British television is filming Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library. American television would never initiate such programmes, which are ...”

“... and ‘slick’ magazines like Vanity Fair and Esquire regularly published modernist writers like Cocteau, Hemingway, Lawrence, Dos Passos and Djuna Barnes. (The New Yorker, founded in 1925, was considerably less daring: the fiction editor, Katharine White, rejected work by Gertrude Stein because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t ...”

“... for therapeutic ceramics classes and arranged poetry readings in the crypt of the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Knocking on the priest’s door and being trusted with a key, we climbed the concrete tower of this 1930s curiosity, designed by Joseph Diongre, in order to catch the morning spread of the city and see the wooded ridge we had to climb in order to ...”

“... the war at the salons Paulette hosted in her Paris flat Lanzmann met every famous person from Cocteau to the poet Francis Ponge. His friends at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he enrolled as a boarder, were no less impressive. Jean Cau, later Sartre’s secretary, shared his anger at a student protest in support of the ...”

“... If so, a bad idea – brushstrokes may slip representationalism, but words do so at their peril.) Cocteau, who himself was lucky to escape épuration, and who saluted Hitler’s favourite sculptor in Occupied Paris, patronised Braque for having ‘the perfect taste of a poor milliner’ – the remark of a gaudy snob. A similar snobbery is implicit in Le ...”

“... 107 of them (20 came out equal 88th), includes not a single example of Buñuel or Rossellini or of Cocteau or Fritz Lang or von Sternberg or Arthur Penn or Pasolini or Warhol or Woody Allen, nor a film directed or choreographed by Busby Berkeley, nor, amazingly, a film starring either Garbo or Fred Astaire, nor Shoah. Instead, it finds room for The Quiet Man ...”

“... and only after more than a decade of appeals, calling on expert testimony from Bataille, Breton, Cocteau and others, was there an acquittal and a lifting of the ban. This radical reversal of official esteem is, however, far less surprising than that such an about-face was possible at all, given whom we’re talking about. ‘Now, dear reader,’ we are told ...”

“... into submission by LSD and hedonism. Paris’s leading artists and intellectuals praise the camp; Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but ...”

“... and for the next six years put on work by Calder, Cornell, Berenice Abbott, Cartier-Bresson, Klee, Cocteau and Duchamp. It also had an exhibition of silkscreen prints and showed art movies.Warhol often pretended not to know anything about anything, asking questions like ‘what was the First World War all about?’, but this may have been a game. He was the ...”

“... her says in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Poulenc’s opera La Voix humaine, which is set to a Cocteau libretto, consists of one woman on the phone to a lover who has rejected her. She finally strangles herself with the line that connects her voice to his self-absenting voice, which the audience never hears. Her throat, ‘la voix humaine’, where the ...”

“... like his Roman counterpart, was a pederast. Perhaps the epitome of the literary queen, a Cuban Cocteau known not for his plays but for his playmates. That was food for gossip in Paris, but this was revolutionary Havana and there was no room left for queens in a revolution. Instead of shouting ‘Off with his head!’, all Cuban queens ended up with no ...”