“... 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 ...”

“... with Ottoline Morrell, and, later, with Constance Malleson, sometimes known by her stage name, Colette O’Niel. As one might expect, what Russell says about Vivienne in his letters to these two women is at times misleading or partial, designed as much to hide as to disclose the extent of his developing involvement. Taking that into account, his comments ...”

“... on the backstop might generate a twinge of Schadenfreude, a no-deal Brexit is unthinkable. As Colette Browne wrote in the Irish Independent on 12 December, ‘if the Brits go down, they’re taking us with them.’ Joanne O’Leary ItalyItalians have been less interested in Brexit than in their own government’s struggles with Brussels. At the end of ...”

“... work out what things to do, as did Maggie in The Mill on the Floss (she didn’t discover Sand or Colette until later). And so did a new girl at school, Elisabeth Mabille, whom she called Zaza.Zaza arrived at Le Cours Désir when Simone was ten: she’d been educated at home until burns caused by an accident when roasting potatoes led to a year’s ...”

“... Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ivy Compton-Burnett, the gallery owner Betty Parsons – even the kooky, spooky, more-than-a-little-ropey ...”

“... niece of the celebrated Belle Epoque writer Marcel Schwob, dissipated friend to Valéry, Wilde and Colette. (Ah, the digressive pleasures of Wikipedia: Marcel’s death in 1905, according to H. Montgomery Hyde in The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, resulted from ‘a syphilitic tumour in the rectum, resulting from his relations with a youth’.) During the ...”