“... my eyes from the sockets – a skirt barred with reds and yellows of the vilest kind, and a pea-green blouse on top, with a gaudy handkerchief on her head, supposed to be the very boldest taste. I shall retire into dove colour and old lavender, with a lace collar and lawn wristlets.’ Despite her ironic tone, Virginia Woolf had an aversion to fashion and ...”

“... not-art he thought he was making. His boxes were only the best known result of his working life. André Breton repeatedly said that the Surrealists were not trying to make art, they were trying to revolutionise life. Life, Breton claimed, was the pursuit of adventure ‘dans le langage, dans la rue, ou dans le rêve’. Though Cornell separated himself from ...”

“... the chair frame have recently been restored by the Louvre to their original matching grey and pale green paint. Given this sort of relationship, it is likely that curved walls prompted the making of furniture with rounded backs, such as the duchesse. In any case, the invention of chairs in which there was, for the first time, a fluent relationship between arms ...”

“... encourage us to think about one city in relation to another, one film in relation to another. André Bazin once chose a scene in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) to exemplify the long-take deep-focus style he regarded as a ‘liberal and democratic’ alternative to the standard manipulation of point of view through rapid-fire ...”

“... listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, calling for more government regulation of radio, much as they do now for television. When the Mercury Theatre’s Danton’s Death opened to mixed reviews the following week, they were quick to pounce. ‘For the ...”

“... for reasons unknown, he scribbled a rough outline of The Great Gatsby in the back of a copy of André Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope – nine entries for the nine chapters of the book, which Churchwell adopts for the same purpose. ‘I, Glamour of Rumsies and Hitchcoks’ is Churchwell’s chapter 1; ‘Ash Heaps. Memory of 125th. Gt. Neck’ is chapter ...”

“... wielded by humanity. By the 1960s at the latest the new times were upon us, with the postwar ‘green revolution’ (the name may sound ironic today) well underway. Scientific farming encouraged galloping growth in human numbers, through higher crop yields; the breakneck urbanisation of the global South, as redundant farmworkers swelled the cities; and ...”

“... sex, some Kissinger for savvy, Cary Grant for looks, Jack Nicholson for entertainment, plus André Malraux or some Jew for brains. Commonest fantasy there is.’ So common, in fact, that it has already been given an outing in Mr Sammler’s Planet: ‘he fetched back, for example, a statement by Angela Gruner, blurted out after several drinks when she ...”

“... her writing can be congested with allusions. Take ‘The Fictions of America’: Jacques Vaché, André Breton, Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her ...”

“... Fidel Castro came down from the mountains armed to his rotten teeth. (Then he wore tattered olive-green fatigues, now he wears a general’s uniform and his teeth have been beautifully capped.) There were other writers, of course. Lino Novas Calvo, for example, one of the best short-story writers in Latin America, Hemingway’s favourite translator and the ...”

“... the world of objects – dust motes, bubbles, a cork, pencils, a piece of hotel notepaper, grapes, green beans, even the sight of a mildly inflamed uvula. (A distasteful glimpse into the depths of an infected mouth is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature ...”

“... Victor Schoelcher, where his teacher was the poet Aimé Césaire, who had won praise in Paris from André Breton for his 1939 poem ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land’. Césaire was one of the founders of the Négritude movement, which Fanon admired for its anti-colonialism, but its appeal to racial authenticity troubled him: he thought of himself as a ...”

“... worker with no education – does not allow more cerebral pretensions to be set aside. Clad in the green and gold of the Brazilian Academy, a tropical copy of the pompous French original, sword in its scabbard at his side, he declared a while ago that the sociologist and the president had never diverged in the course of a coherent career and a creative ...”

“... it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.’ On Sunday 27 January André Gide, also in Algiers, was, according to his own account, checking out of the Grand Hôtel d’Orient when he saw the names ‘Oscar Wilde’ and ‘Alfred Douglas’ on the slate on which guests’ names were written. Theirs were at the bottom, which must ...”

“... Polisario when Hassan made a dramatic last-minute intervention, announced by the palace as the ‘Green March’. It involved busing 35,000 Moroccan civilians to the border and chaperoning them into the territory in a show of popular longing. Madrid instructed its troops not to open fire and caved in almost immediately; days later it signed Western Sahara ...”