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“... track shorts with shammy-leather internal arse patch designed and executed by mother, I once saw Jean Cocteau. Something was going on in a bank, or a place like that on the Riviera – I think it was Menton. We were inquisitive and looked through a narrow opening, and there he was, saying something to his muralist about shapes on the ceiling. Were they ...”

“... Jean Cocteau​ had a genius for being seen. As an elegant young man, with the cult poet Anna de Noailles on his arm, thanks to an introduction from Proust, he danced the polka at the Bastille Day ball in 1912, careful, first, to alert the photographers. ‘If I were to take a picture of a village wedding,’ a photographer once remarked, ‘Jean Cocteau would appear between the bride and groom ...”

“... the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to ...”

“... attitude is all the more noticeable for its juxtaposition here with the crisp, refined figure of Jean Cocteau, a contrast which justifies Cocteau’s inclusion amongst the sketches far more compellingly than Cosman’s practical explanation that he was involved in a performance of Oedipus Rex. There is one eloquent ...”

“... for her E1027 house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and a photograph showing the face and hands of Jean Cocteau, modelled or cast in plaster. (For an exhibition at Norwich Gallery in 2003, Chaimowicz devised an apartment for Cocteau, featuring works by Warhol, Giacometti and Tom of Finland.) Throughout, there’s ...”

“... is checking into a grand hotel in Rome along with his new friend, the foppish, snobbish young Jean Cocteau. They are collaborating on Parade, a Ballets Russes production with a decor meant to ‘reassure the public that far from being pro-German or pro-Bolshevik or a fumiste, Picasso was not an iconoclast, as chauvinist philistines had maintained ...”

“... played by Pierre Fresnay, creates a diversion to cover the escape of the other two, played by Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio, working-class and Jewish respectively. It all sounds rather stark and allegorical in description, and Communist viewers in the Thirties were keen to see this arrangement as sounding the knell of the old order. Fresnay has earlier ...”

“... friends, lovers and associates during these two decades is impressive. Man Ray photographed her, Jean Cocteau sketched her, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot praised her work, Aleister Crowley exploited it. In the Twenties Harold Acton came across her in Paris, not exactly among ‘the bevies of truculent women’ who surrounded Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford ...”

“... added underwater photography to her portfolio. She has never been short of professional admirers. Jean Cocteau and John Grierson are fulsome in their praise. Mick Jagger tells her he has seen some of her films 15 times. Nor, of course, does she lack detractors; the fiercest in recent years has been Susan Sontag, who traced a line of Fascist exaltation ...”

“... was found dead on the floor of a Palermo hotel room from an overdose of the barbiturate Soneryl. Jean Cocteau, who got to know him a few years earlier in a rehab clinic at Saint-Cloud (and who remembered Roussel asking him wearily: ‘Why aren’t I as famous as Pierre Loti?’), wrote Roussel’s obituary for La Nouvelle Revue Française, saying that ...”

“... Elvis Presley – as well as boundless self-confidence. He also had a letter of introduction to Jean Paulhan, a former director of the Nouvelle Revue française, published by Gallimard. Isou went straight to its offices. Paulhan wasn’t there, but Gaston Gallimard was. Isou announced that the most important literary journalist in Romania had arrived and ...”

“... or pretending to be pro-German,’ Ingrams says. He may even have been put in a novel by Jean Cocteau, ‘as the archetype of the dashing English gentle-man’. Whatever he was, he died at the age of 53, and Ingrams ‘has just passed that age himself’. It has been observed that when a son gets to be older than his dead father ever ...”

“... guessing.’ (‘The more visible they make me,’ Moss has said, ‘the less visible I become.’ Jean Cocteau said it first.) Stella Vine, an artist who painted Moss both post-partum and wearing some clothes, has also compared them. There’s ‘bravery’, Vine says, ‘in Kate’s eyes’ – just as in those of Mona Lisa – ‘and I love her for ...”

“... continued in these years to be treated by doctors. In 1928, he was in the same maison de santé as Jean Cocteau, then being got off opium. Cocteau noticed, as others had, how like Proust Roussel was – in voice, in physique and in nervousness. Roussel, on the other hand, spoilt the comparison by asking ...”

“... comedies, old detective stories, old chatty novels, stage farces – not everyone would connect Jean Cocteau with Sid James and Kenneth Connor. But it is above all a novel of the Thatcher years, satirically seen as the reign of a particular mentality, easily identified, but not so easily defined. Coe portrays it through six grotesques, members of a ...”