“... resolutely cultivated his privacy (odd for such an alert and opinionated and interesting man, a one-man talk-show in another world: ‘A Word in Edgeways’, as it might be, ‘with Milan Kundera’), wrote (in French) a few mostly short novels with (in English) forgettable, mostly single-word (and if not, then ...”

“... had sent his troops into Goa in 1960, without a drop of blood being shed. But he was a humane man, and the freely-elected leader of a democracy; he gave the Goanese their own autonomous state government, and encouraged their full participation in India’s politics. In every respect, General Suharto was Nehru’s polar opposite. For a year or so after ...”

“... here! I am, I truly am Beatrice./How did you dare approach the mountain?/Do you not know that here man lives in joy?’ Although Dante has already been purged of all seven vices, she now charges him with betrayal: he ‘took himself from me and gave himself to others’, setting his steps ‘upon an untrue way’ and pursuing ‘false images of the good’ so ...”

“... ways for different people. A couple of years earlier, in a letter to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Simone de Beauvoir had pronounced it ‘less and less likely’ that Hitler could want a war. Now she took the news that the summer examinations of 1940 had been cancelled to be ‘definitive and without hope’. St Exupéry’s friend Léon Werth was heartened by ‘a ...”

“... she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp: a one-woman posse, ready to drop anything at a phone call (including the classes I was supposed to be teaching at Stanford) and drive her around to various Tower record stores and dim sum restaurants. Most important, I became adept at clucking ...”

“... about two sisters, as different as any two humans could possibly be, who fall into the orbit of a man whose sexual power may be likened to gravity. Williams wanted a great director for his play but weeks passed with no word from Kazan, who was called Gadget or Gadge by everybody in the theatre world. When Williams called Kazan at home, Molly, Kazan’s ...”

“... hotel and miss his train, as he did not want Wilde to think he was avoiding him. ‘This terrible man,’ he wrote, ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in ...”

“... including that collie) is only 25, and not long divorced, but she ‘cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.’ Her amnesia isn’t straightforwardly self-protective, since one of the things she does remember is her husband saying, when she was in hospital to give ...”

“... horseshit you print in Harper’s Bazaar.’ Mailer’s early success made his struggle ‘to be a man’, as he often called it (dreaming again of Hemingway), into a struggle to distinguish reality from everything around it. Lennon understands what Mailer was up against: he was up against himself, up against the failure of the novels after his first one to ...”

“... that ‘there are a thousand unnoticed openings ... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul’ should degenerate into nonsense, and Fielding differentiated his honest characters, the naive and the stupid, from their victimisers, the hypocritical and fraudulent, according to whether they depended on physical appearance to reveal or conceal ...”

“... Michel Leiris recalls his mother warning him to beware of ‘bad people’ in the Bois de Boulogne. He imagined the predators in the woods to be ‘satyrs’, and later, cannibals: he had been struck by an exotic colour illustration in Le Pêle-Mêle, a humorous weekly, of ‘savages’ eating an explorer. Leiris (b. 1901) went on to become an ...”

“... is seen as a source of national shame. Interviewed in Le Monde, Jacques Thuillier of the Collège de France complained that, ‘à l’étranger’, Poussin’s reputation had been dulled if not sullied; the quatercentenary of his birth was an opportunity to clean and polish his image to its true lustre, to show the world that the artist was (in the words of ...”

“... and patriotism. The picture returned to France the same year, into the collection of Isaac de Camondo, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay.It’s inviting to assume that by the 1870s British and French art were on separate and deeply divergent tracks: Pre-Raphaelitism versus Impressionism, sentimental moralism versus non-narrative realism; though with ...”

“... I called Julian Harp, who solves the problem of engineless flight. He recognises that when a man lies on his stomach and flaps his arms, the wing-tips point forward instead of back like a bird’s: so he must contrive the means to fly lying on his back, and he succeeds, constructing models, and then his final set of wings, out of the struts of umbrellas ...”