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“... 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 ...”

“... his death, the shops of Bayreuth were packed with trinkets and tat. In Claudine s’en va (1903), Colette itemised ‘the postcards, the Grails in red glass, the colour lithographs, the wood carvings, the table mats, the beer mugs, all bearing the image of the dieu Wagner’.There​ was nothing inevitable about Wagner’s eventual capture by the Völkish ...”

“... Briand instructed his new high commissioner in Syria, Henry de Jouvenel (recently divorced from Colette and no doubt hoping for a quieter life), to carry out an inquiry that would refute the ‘exaggerated claims’ – in other words, he wanted a cover-up. Meanwhile, in South-West Africa, the South African authorities had been bombing the defenceless ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein and Russell, Hermione Lee’s Woolf, Judith Thurman’s Dinesen and Colette – have been distinguished by their intense, liberating attention to sexual-emotional themes. It may be true that Cather’s peculiar, mysteriously configured homoeroticism has not yet had the sort of intelligent analysis it demands, but that is no ...”