“... After Brigitte Bardot’s​ death in December, the editorial in Paris-Match was desolate: the country had lost ‘its wife, its daughter, its mother, its confidante … its conscience, its Marianne’; French cinema had ‘faded’, no one would again embody ‘liberty and beauty’ as she had; ‘tears will flow ...”

“... In March​ 1945, the classical music world in Paris split into warring camps after the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s two-hour devotional suite for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. The performer was Yvonne Loriod, a young pianist who would later become Messiaen’s wife. Reciting texts infused with Catholic mysticism after each movement, Messiaen struck the critic Bernard Gavoty as a ‘lunatic curator of a vanished museum’; Poulenc described his followers, the so-called messiaeniques, as a ‘fanatical sect’ speaking ‘an impossible literary jargon ...”

“... he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long as he remained in Trieste or Zurich or Paris he was able to take the part of maestro, conducting the chorus of voices in the parlour of the grandest house they had once lived in – 23 Castlewood Avenue, off Belgrave Square, Rathmines – or in the back kitchen of some much more modest ...”

“... her later pronouncement – after the Brownings had finally met Sand, at Elizabeth’s urging, in Paris – that the novelist was ‘a noble woman, under the mud’, and that the cigarette was ‘really a feminine weapon if properly understood’. Perhaps wisely, she does not expand on the proper understanding of cigarettes. Her experience in directing the ...”

“... the Limousin to meet Deleuze for the first time. He had grown up in La Garenne-Colombes, outside Paris, where his father ran a chocolate factory. By the age of 15 he was going to Communist Party meetings and selling copies of L’Humanité. Within three years he’d joined the Trotskyist opposition. While studying for a degree in pharmacology, he made ...”

“... of the 19th century. Lotto was re-created as a Renaissance neurotic in the likeness of the age by Bernard Berenson, who wrote a book about him in 1895. (‘I happen to have a temperament,’ Berenson grandly wrote, ‘which inclines me to forgive much in an artist like Lotto.’) Since then he has often had the dubious honour of being considered one of the ...”

“... honeymoon tour of Europe. But the Franco-Prussian War cramped the Chopins’ style; they left Paris as the city was about to be besieged and sailed back to New Orleans. Kate was already pregnant with her first child. By 1882, when Oscar died of yellow fever, there were six children. The young widow took over his business; Toth argues that she may also ...”

“... service: MacDonald was much at sea and missed some of his cues. Then came John Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw, presumably the literary kings of the time. Galsworthy behaved impeccably, doing everything absolutely right. Shaw got enjoyment by looking around most of the time. The next pair were Edmund Gosse and J.M. Barrie. Barrie had arranged the whole ...”

“... prints have survived, and so has he. Recently his work has been shown at the Cartier Foundation in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. A small exhibition at the Arts Club in Dover Street (until 31 January, by appointment) gives a good idea of his studio portraits, despite the fact that the prints – twenty or so – are on display in a room that serves ...”

“... who later became men of law. Edmond Giscard, father of the French President, ‘came up’ to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, attended the semi-serious, semi-fashionable lectures at the École des Sciences Politiques, and then married a Mademoiselle Bardoux. The Bardoux were a typical Third Republic ‘bourgeois dynasty’. The father, Agénor ...”

“... near Limoges, she was raised in poverty by her mother. While she was still young they moved to Paris, to the working-class neighbourhood of Montmartre (since 1961, the square at the base of the Sacré Coeur funicular has been known as Place Suzanne-Valadon). At eighteen, she had a son. Maurice Utrillo became one of the famous painters of Montmartre, and ...”

“... began my dime novel’ – i.e. the story of his travels from Baku to Turkey and on to Paris – ‘which was distinguished from thousands of other dime novels in neither style nor structure. The only difference is that mine actually took place.’ Eunuchs, seraglios, daggers and murders abound, and so does improbably formulaic dialogue. ‘The ...”

“... it was in a very real sense, the 20th century’s own autobiography.’ Couldn’t her editors (or Bernard Levin who helped her and whose ‘passion for the English language’ she cites) have improved on the ‘mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth’, or were they seduced by Huffington’s glamour (it bursts forth from the dust jacket)? If ...”

“... on 17 October, a few weeks after the publication of his memoirs. He died on the steps of the Paris courthouse where he had been testifying on behalf of his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, who had been violently attacked in a book on French Fascism. The case was not a simple one, as de Jouvenel had said and done some imprudent things in the Thirties. Yet ...”

“... radiated with a spectral white-on-black glow. When war broke out again the Themersons were in Paris. Franciszka began work as a cartographer for the Polish government-in-exile. After Paris fell, she and other officials sailed to England on the MS Batory, the Polish liner that would take Roald Dahl to America two years ...”