“... the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such ...”

“... this new sun.I suspect that Berger himself had read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the ...”

“... the volume of academic literature about them, where the legendary overproduction of writing by the French about their national icons – there are three thousand books on de Gaulle, five times as many as on Churchill – needs to be taken into account. A more significant index is translation. On the centenary of Du côté de chez Swann, a colloquium could ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other ...”

“... have consistently displayed a capacity for division of counsel and confusion of purpose in which David Steel would have felt thoroughly at home at any time. ‘An ill-organised miscellany of view-points’ is how Paul Addison, in The Road to 1945, describes it from 1916 on. Or as Neville Chamberlain wrote in his diary for 19 October 1935, ‘our party is ...”

“... of Rousseau, the form seems to have been regarded as largely English. He cites a definition from a French dictionary published in 1866 which describes ‘autobiography’ as a word of English origin referring to a kind of writing commonly practised in England but rare in France. Buckley is more interested in the ‘subjective impulse’ as a cultural ...”

“... as special, as ‘marginal’, as the capacity to recognise a sonnet in a foreign language (French). They undertook their labours ‘in a spirit of service’, says Heaney, service to ‘a cause worth supporting’, seemingly unaware (Irish though Heaney is) that ‘a worthy cause’ is precisely the most insidious and the most disastrous temptation for ...”

“... double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from translations into French by the Albanian Jusuf Vrioni. But Kadare is worth reading for the peepholes he opens into what it’s like to be Albanian – his own mind-set being one of them. He was born in 1936 in the reign of King Zog – the period of The File on H. He is a poet as ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can be twisted into the shape of sub-human ...”

“... past will always deaden the present. ‘The past belonged to him privately,’ Emmanuelle Alt of French Vogue said at the Grand Palais, ‘it was the future he shared.’ The English model Cara Delevingne came onstage wearing a dress of pale pink marabou feathers. A visual onomatopoeia, looking like the thing she described, she almost purred as she read a ...”

“... as the stories they tell’). On the front cover is Marie Antoinette’s face, from a well-known French School portrait, turned upside down, with a large white exclamation mark cut out of it, below the word ‘Kapow’ in a small font. On the back cover there’s a circular photograph of a rioter kicking in a plate-glass window somewhere. On the first ...”

“... cameo appearances, adverts, jail or, if they’re lucky, B-movies. William Friedkin made The French Connection and The Exorcist and was nominated for several Oscars before climbing to the top of his personal godhead and leaping off. Last year he directed Episode 9 in the eighth season of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. M. Night Shyamalan was ...”

“... for a while as live-in curators. In 1970 a new modernist extension was added, by Leslie Martin and David Owers, to show off more of the work in a larger space with more generous sofas. The latest development – funded by £3.65 million from Arts Council England and £2.32 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund – has involved entirely remodelling and ...”

“... was L.H. Myers’s The Near and the Far, which I read in New Orleans in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or a variation on one), where the curtains were never opened. Neither book was so huge as to destabilise the whole experience of reading. Bottom’s ...”

“... Gilbert Murray). ‘Brekekekek co-ax co-ax’ is what Dionysus yells to the frogs (aka the French) to shut them up while Charon ferries him across to Hades – a detail I learned not from Briggs’s notes, but from an account of the poem by David Trotter.No doubt conscious of the fact that Paris has been reissued ...”