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“... buckled, and he wrote an open letter to – of all people – Rufus Isaacs, now involved in the Paris Peace Conference. Cecil’s death had brought to an end ‘the great Marconi duel’ they had been fighting, Chesterton began grandly. Isaacs’s actions in 1913 and his ‘type of politics’ had discredited the nation, Chesterton wrote, and he couldn’t ...”

“... Disco was much more and much better than all that.’ Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La ...”

“... A few years ago I was flying from Paris to Copenhagen on a day of calm and perfect weather. The flight took me over the sea beyond the coast of Holland, and looking down I was able to see in full detail the landscape below sea level, with its hills and valleys and – astonishingly – a lake: an accumulation of dark-blue water at the bottom of a valley, sharply separated from its lighter surroundings and maintained by some unknown physical process ...”

“... connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.Simone’s father, Bernard Weil, was a successful doctor. Her mother, Selma, had wanted to study medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it. Thoroughly assimilated French Jews, Simone’s parents practised no religion, and didn’t tell their children that they were Jewish until ...”

“... to allow his representative to check their authenticity. When the diaries were published in Paris and New York in 1959, a British official asked a diplomat at the Irish Embassy in London what the reaction in Ireland would be to the release of the diaries, adding that ‘in view of the present attitude in Britain to homosexuality, few people now in this ...”

“... trip for the tourist, the most fashionable spot for a second residence. London is now closer to Paris than Edinburgh by train; there are some 15 million visits by Britons to France every year, more than from any other country. The vicinity is lulling. Its effect is a countrywide equivalent of the snare against which every schoolchild struggling with French ...”

“... The Life of the Mind, when she had a heart attack walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to help, then was joined from New York by Lotte Köhler, Arendt’s longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Köhler were appointed joint executors after Arendt suffered a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The ...”

“... call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single ...”

“... and achieved some stature of their own: Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography (1980); Ruth Bernard Yeazell in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Howard Feinstein in Becoming William James (1984); Gerald Myers in William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Jane Maher in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry ...”

“... in the view that Eagleton is still a Cambridge man: in his essay ‘The Terry Eagleton Story’, Bernard Bergonzi pointed to the end of Literary Theory: An Introduction, with its expressed preference for ‘specific, living and practical democracy’ over the abstractions of the ballot box (‘specific’ and ‘living’, those Leavisite shibboleths), and ...”

“... difficulties also. They can offer hardly any letters; and how well would we know Henry James or Bernard Shaw without their letters? Macey and Miller even seem not to have been allowed photographs, apart from a jacket-illustration, as though someone had placed a ban on these. At all events one does not, from either of their books, quite end up feeling that ...”

“... not just about policing in America, but school curriculums in Britain, the repertoire of the Paris Opéra, St Nicholas’s assistant Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands, and racial disparities in Covid deathrates across the West.When Chauvin went on trial nine months later, the prosecution was at pains to narrow things back down, and reduce the scope of ...”

“... the same!’ he wrote in a letter) and he persuaded editors, impresarios and lovers of poetry in Paris and London to organise recitals for her. She, in return, found that Mirsky was the only critic worth respecting, not least because he refused to let politics affect his judgment. But politics, of a visionary and quasi-religious kind, were now beginning to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in mid-March 2003. Nafisi didn’t support the war, but she thanked its academic architect, Bernard Lewis, in her acknowledgments for ‘opening the door’. The popularity of the book made Nafisi a target – Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia academic, intemperately compared her to Lynndie England – but Reading Lolita in Tehran is political in the way we ...”