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“... to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair. The problem is that ...”

“... loafs by on a bicycle), d’Ormesson, Cartano, Genevieve Dormann, Michel Serres, Jean Dutourd and Bernard-Henri Lévy (Prix Bernard-Henri Lévy). My critics will think of me as a namedropper as distinct from a reader and writer of books, and there is an atom of truth in it: I am not saying which atom. But ...”

“... left of much of the liberal intelligentsia. In December 2001, at the Berlin Literature Festival, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German Green MEP, berated the New York poet Eliot Weinberger and myself for opposing the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan. Lévy had told the Berlin audience that he was ...”

“... a bomb. Kouchner accused Péan of anti-semitism and rallied celebrity friends to defend him, from Bernard-Henri Lévy at home to Hillary Clinton and Kofi Annan abroad. Newspapers of the left – notably Libération – opened their columns to Péan, while Le Monde attacked his book. The news weekly Le Point conducted an independent investigation of ...”

“... his plays (he’s written four) and won the Prix Interallié (whose other winners include Malraux, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq). He says his biggest regret is not being English, and indeed, despite his quickly achieved yet continuing fame in France, he is almost unknown here. In the opening pages of Artificial Snow, the narrator misses the ...”

“... ardently supported the invasion of Iraq in the name of humanitarian values. The inescapable Bernard-Henri Lévy was at the fore in demanding Nato go to war against Gaddafi. (Lévy has ‘moved on’ to other causes now that Libya is deep in chaos.) Human rights organisations have also been at it. Although it’s ...”

“... Guardian interview – as he was by what he saw as Hollande’s other great mistake, a lunch with Bernard-Henri Lévy in a swanky restaurant near Fouquet’s – and he brought up the interview again, on 6 May, during the victory flight from Tulle that took Hollande to Paris for his Bastille moment. On the plane Hollande reviewed the Guardian ...”

“... slightly worn espadrilles, and sockless white ankles’, and of course he is a cartoon version of Bernard-Henri Lévy. Characters from The Sympathiser return, among them Lana, the General’s daughter turned pop singer, who, having spent a night with the narrator years earlier, now has a surprise for him; Claude, who is as unwilling as the General to let ...”

“... were not heroic defenders of Christian values but plotters of ethnic cleansing. Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Lévy felt it their duty to visit Sarajevo and publicise its plight. It was, as Sontag put it, the Spanish Civil War for her generation. Was this version any closer to reality than West’s? What the Victorians called the Eastern Question had ...”

“... the Lion of the Panjshir Valley, wants to reboot the Northern Alliance, while his press attaché, Bernard-Henri Lévy, has compared the fall of Kabul to the fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths. The ruthless Afghan Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum flew back from hospital in Istanbul to call for war on the Taliban. Navy Seals brandished copies of Clausewitz ...”

“... tack from Tocqueville’s, and no present-day French author seems equal to the task (in 2006, Bernard-Henri Lévy published American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville; it was an embarrassment even for him). It would also be wonderful to imagine a latter-day Tocqueville being able to write a book entitled ‘Democracy in ...”

“... Oh those awful Serbs! Until recently no one cared or knew much about them in the West and now almost everyone has an opinion about them and it’s most likely to be unfavourable. Karadzic and Mladic – icons of inhumanity – are taken as embodiments of the soul of their people. Even before the wars in the former Yugoslavia started, American newspapers are offering analyses of the Serbs ...”

“... safe bet, particularly when France unexpectedly recognised the Transitional National Council after Bernard-Henri Lévy persuaded Sarkozy to act quickly. Only a few years before, Sarkozy had given Gaddafi a warm welcome in Paris and, when criticised for it, pointed in his defence to Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons programme, and, more ...”

“... that she doesn’t want the matter pursued. Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani ...”

“... seduction of big ideas was internationally infectious. Returning to my hotel lobby I encountered Bernard-Henri Lévy bathed in TV lights, giving an interview to a local network. BHL had just delivered a lecture at the local university about ‘Putinism as Fascism’: ‘Putin is frightened of the loss of traditional values and the principles of ...”