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“... If you had taken a walk in Paris last autumn, you might have come across grinning cats graffitied on walls and buildings. The person responsible for this was Chris Marker: cats play an important role in his latest film, Chats perchés. Very little is known about Marker himself; there are perhaps 12 photographs of him in circulation, and even fewer interviews ...”

“... Like​ the knives of Chinese jugglers’, Charles Bataille said of his friend Félix Nadar, ‘turbulent, unexpected, terrifying’. Adam Begley’s biography describes a life lived so frenetically, it’s surprising it lasted so long – Nadar died at the age of ninety, in 1910. Yet he is remembered today primarily for the stillness and serenity of his photographic portraits of 19th-century Parisian luminaries ...”

“... Eric Rohmer​ never left things to chance, but he did make use of the unexpected. It’s a paradox we find a lot in his films, and something he practised daily in the double life he lived for more than seventy years. In his film-making he demanded exhaustive preparation and absolute precision: he recorded countless sunsets disappearing into the sea in the hope of capturing one elusive green ray; he planted flowers so that a month later an actor could pick a rose; he posted mail to a false address to check a plot point that rested on a letter not reaching its destination ...”

“... limits even if they are based only on hypothetical truths. The history of Cahiers, as recounted by Emilie Bickerton, might be imagined as a series of ‘as if’ wagers: if a critical position can be taken through argumentation, its premises might become truths. The magazine was effectively founded, in 1951, on just such an ‘as if’, with critics ...”