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“... concern – campus politics. Taking as his title ‘The Oldest Dead White European Males’, Bernard Knox addressed the impact made on a conservative discipline of new methods and concerns: the anthropology-influenced work of the Paris circle of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and J.-P. Vernant, ‘militant feminists’ and ...”

“... and with great enjoyment in French and Italian, and perhaps above all in German: one letter to Bernard Berenson speaks nostalgically of returning to her adolescent love for the 13th-century Minneleider and the Old Icelandic Edda; in another, she picks up Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse as a ‘diversion’ from her own writing and finds it ...”

“... France. Before his ratings fell and Sarkozy dumped him in a recent reshuffle, the foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who has ‘human rights’ written all over him, was the darling of the opinion polls. Even so, there’s a residual feeling that the only real rights are political rights, like the Rights of Man, soldered into a national consensus about ...”

“... woman was certainly an attention-getter. A poem in L’Artiste addressed her as the queen of Paris; a friendly caricature of her made the cover of another journal; and Zola, writing under a pseudonym, hailed the 25-year-old artist, whom he had yet to meet, as ‘a man in a crowd of eunuchs’. The liberal critic Théophile Thoré (then publishing as ...”

“... in the streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. The profit James accumulates here is above all imaginative, but there’s ...”

“... against the Gordon rioters) and to win the contract and finance to supply water to the City of Paris; but for this last project, as he frequently complained, he couldn’t get a signature on the necessary official papers. His attitude to the company’s customers and competitors was robust. As to the first he introduced an enduring and irritating feature ...”

“... Few people​ visit Paris for its modern architecture. But away from the Haussmannian buildings lining the boulevards of the city centre, the less regulated banlieue was a zone of architectural experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s. The Choux de Créteil – Gérard Grandval’s ‘cabbages’ – rise beside the highway, each tower with curved balconies that vaguely resemble leaves ...”

“... Others were more inclined to see it as a calamity. Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between ...”

“... called to mind I.B. Singer and, in the most recent Zuckerman novel, Henry Roth. But Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud’s first biographer, persuasively argues that the house, the wife, the joylessness and the drive are all echt Malamud. ‘If you think of me sitting at my desk, you can’t be wrong,’ Malamud once wrote to a friend he would not make the time to ...”

“... over the following decades, various volumes came out: letters to artist friends, notably Emile Bernard, were joined in 1914 by an edition of those sent to Theo, by far his most frequent correspondent. The 1963 single-volume selection that I bought in my student days was drawn from a co-ordinated English text published in 1927. In common, I guess, with ...”

“... Bernard – originally Bernhard – Berenson was a Lithuanian Jewish refugee rescued from poverty by the charity of Bostonian plutocrats who sent him to Harvard and then to Europe. During the 1890s he established himself as an expert on Italian Renaissance art and simultaneously made his knowledge indispensable to the booming international art trade, which made him a very rich man by the time the second volume of his biography by Ernest Samuels opens in 1903 ...”

“... an ambush in Kabul province. Sarkozy spoke of their ‘supreme sacrifice’, his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, talked about ‘the memory of their courage’. This affair was scandalous too – there were worries about logistical support and intelligence, and above all France’s involvement in the war – but not in the same way as Svarusko’s ...”

“... too, and what is more, on the first night of our honeymoon, my husband and I dined with him in Paris. There’s showing off for you. Skelton never shows off. I am not sure whether psychoanalysis recognises a beauty-and-the-beast complex, but it exists. A penchant for Stroheim is a symptom of it, and among the many men in Skelton’s life, the three who got ...”

“... Nonetheless, the overall uproar is joyful. ‘He had no conception of beauty,’ Emile Bernard pronounced soon after Cezanne’s death. ‘He possessed only the idea of truth.’ This assessment, prompted by a letter in which Cezanne undertook to provide the young Bernard with ‘the truth in painting’, has ...”

“... another soldier who was calmly reading a book. He found he was talking to a fellow-Parisian. Guy-Bernard Delapierre, an Egyptologist. The two were shortly separated, but he was later handed a note from Delapierre giving him Delapierre’s address in Paris, and they were to become close friends during the second half of the ...”