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“... For an unsexy book​ about sex addiction, you can’t do much better than Leïla Slimani’s Adèle. The new novel from the writer of the bestselling, Prix Goncourt-winning Lullaby (2016) asks the reader to watch uncomfortably as its protagonist moves from man to man, having many sexual encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it ...”

“... her writing to be ‘very direct, fat-free, efficient’, and the translations by Holly James and Lauren Elkin are faithful to her aim. But the staccato prose, the weird punctuation and Debré’s reliance on endless lists wears you down. The provocation stops being shocking and leads nowhere: ‘I understood the violence of men’; ‘I understand ...”

“... 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 ...”