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“... a cultural journalist at Libération; her long-term lover, a married media academic called Jean-Michel Leibowitz; her friend Dominique Rossi, a gay activist; and William Miller, an unbalanced young man who is Dominique’s lover for a time and then spends the rest of his life trying to destroy him. William’s behaviour drives much of the plot, as he ...”

“... period, at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist ...”

“... I well remember at the beginning of the war,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, ‘being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism ...”

“... work consists of such paintings as La Toilette, the Two Brothers and the portrait of Gertrude Stein which date from shortly before the invention of Cubism, and some of the drawings he made in 1918 (The Bathers, for example, in the Fogg Art Gallery) and in the early Twenties (the mother and child at present on exhibition at the Royal Academy) – together ...”

“... places: you would never have caught her going up the Amazon or into the jungle like her aunt Jean Liedloff, who wrote The Continuum Concept, a book about child-rearing based on her experiences with a Stone Age Indian tribe in the Venezuelan jungle, and kept an ant-eater in her flat in Primrose Hill. Having trapped you in some rented house or her own loft ...”

“... during the First World War. Irwin hung out with the expatriates in Paris, including Gertrude Stein, whom she found obnoxious and overbearing, and in the mid-Twenties contributed an anonymous autobiographical essay to a series in the Nation which was entitled ‘These Modern Women’. There’s virtually nothing about the Maida books in Irwin’s papers ...”

“... go. Writers under discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles ...”

“... that a very innovative form was necessary to express them.’ She should, like Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, have experimented with form and language. I am not sure that this is so. The wild excesses of the novels flourish while, in the background, day-to-day realism plods on. That is their strength. As for her life with Caroline, Mazo considered ...”

“... in the world. She had also become a Modernist enthusiasm. Among her fans were Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Cocteau and Le Corbusier (he imagined making her the star of a musical production in which she would evolve from monkey to modern woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire ...”

“... voice became language in my heart. That was happiness.’ His favourite book was Jean-Henri Fabre’s 19th-century entomological notes and drawings; he collected insects and watched birds; he wrote poems in the sand with a twig, poems with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he ...”

“... that was bad enough. But he turned out to be so lacking in painterly flair that Gertrude Stein, in her un-Delphic way, told him not to give up the day job – he would do well to join the family business. (Some of his early canvases have been included in the show to prove her point.) Though he switched to photography, he always said he was more ...”

“... America to Europe itself has been a product of a now vast academic industry: some five hundred Jean Monnet chairs are currently planted across the Union. In the midst of a sea of conformity, a cluster of thinkers has emerged whose writing represents a qualitative advance in critical understanding of the Union. In independence of spirit closer in type to ...”

“... met Juliano in New York was beguiled: Danny Glover, Tony Kushner, the philanthropist and writer Jean Stein. Julian Schnabel cast him as a sheikh in Miral, Juliano’s last performance on film. Eve Ensler invited him to stage The Vagina Monologues in Jenin. In a city of hyphenated identities his mixed identity made him all the more attractive, and more ...”

“... it was in 1963 that the first of the great exclusions took place, Sollers’s rival at this point, Jean-Edern Hallier, retrospectively observing that there was not enough room for two male hippopotami in that particular water-hole. The reorganisation of the journal was entrusted to Marcellin Pleynet (one of the merits of Forest’s history is that he gives ...”

“... cry. At nightfall in this quarry a few kilometres outside Avignon, Peter Brook’s staging of Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of The Mahabharata begins. Wisdom-book and story-repository, fifteen times the size of the Bible, The Mahabharata was written in Sanskrit, but the words you hear are French, spoken with a piquant diversity of accents matching ...”