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“... God.Montessori’s educational theory is both less playful than one might assume and, as Cristina de Stefano’s biography shows, more deeply rooted in Catholicism. She wrote that the task of education was to find in the child ‘the true spirit of man, the design of the Creator: the scientific and religious truth’. She ...”

“... herself and called him ‘laughing boy’. If those do not make you laugh, how about the idea of a man writing a book on Rabelais today without once mentioning Bakhtin? The punch-line to that one is that it turns out to be a very good book. To be accurate, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross is not entirely about Rabelais, but Rabelais is one of its two ...”

“... the warlords they supported against the Communists. In Peking her consort for a time was Alberto de Zara, Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy, whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was often expressed in verse. When she moved to Shanghai, she made another close friend in another dashing young Fascist, Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini’s Foreign ...”

“... is nothing but an off-shoot of desire. The sociobiologists take such a position, arguing that a man’s liking for female beauty only expresses, in a refined manner, an underlying reproductive drive. Though they start at the opposite end of the spectrum from Clark, they arrive at a similarly barren conclusion: that all beautiful women are essentially the ...”

“... his return to Milan from Prague in 1587, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) is having his first one-man show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice: 15 February until 31 May. This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by ...”

“... In urgent need of an antidote to Paul Burrell’s memoir (see Short Cuts, 20 November), I hurried down to the London Review Bookshop to pick up a copy of Henry Green’s Loving. The recent (2000) Vintage Classics edition seemed as good a bet as any: it has a nice picture of a peacock swanking on the cover, and costs only £6 ...”

“... and, in the end, more poetic sense of what it was to be on the move: ‘je suis un piéton, rien de plus.’ A poet, he meant to say, needs legs, whether they’re for pacing the same worn patch of carpet – any stamping-ground from Wordsworth’s Grasmere to Olson’s Gloucester, Mass – or trudging towards the evasions of wilderness, which was so often ...”

“... In​ his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for Churchill. In response De Gaulle warned them ‘never to forget that within him breathes the soul of Pitt ...”

“... Atlantic Oceans. He couldn’t find that either, but came across Hawaii instead. Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, the Spaniard who landed in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in 1605, believed he had found the southern and northern rims of a continent that stretched all the way from the western coast of New Holland (now Australia) to the eastern Pacific, and perhaps ...”

“... it seems. They reside in Paris in the Musée des lettres et manuscrits, opened in 2004 on the rue de Nesle, relocated (and reopened) in 2010 on the boulevard Saint-Germain. But the presentation of them and the French literary world’s response are cloaked in the piety that now surrounds Proust’s reputation, which does give an air of fiction to the whole ...”

“... Alice Phillipot moved to Paris, where she designed hats with Elsa Schiaparelli and modelled for Man Ray. In 1931 she met the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen, whom she married in 1934. The pair became involved with the Surrealists and others orbiting their circle, including Picasso and Joan Miró, who, hearing of the Paalens’ interest in prehistoric ...”

“... tendresses bestiales … Maîtres jongleurs, ils transforment le lieu et les personnes, et usent de la comédie magnétique. Les yeux flambent, le sang chante, les os s’élargissent, les larmes et des filets rouges ruissellent.Chinese, Hottentots, Bohemians, simpletons, hyenas, Molochs, old dementias, sinister demons, they mix popular, maternal numbers ...”

“... his knowledge indispensable to the booming international art trade, which made him a very rich man by the time the second volume of his biography by Ernest Samuels opens in 1903. These relations with dealers, which were either discreet or secret, deepened in subsequent decades, and it should have come as no surprise to Berenson when he returned from ...”

“... and themes which will make enough noise to fill up the silence of the great open spaces. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace is a ‘Western’ novel executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony ...”

“... Charlie Russel, Otto’s partner, may seem a mere caricature of a ‘movement’ lawyer (‘like Paul Muni’, Otto says, ‘defending the unlovely and unloved’); and certainly, when Charlie shows up on the doorstep late one night, with the face of a Renaissance putto gone to seed, moaning about Otto’s ‘moral failure’ and complaining about his wife ...”