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“... this aspect to which a friend drew my attention when I got home. Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted. ‘History is a combination of reality and lies,’ he said. ‘The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the ...”

“... of Thomas Penman. However, I’m not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been ...”

“... Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred pages of one ...”

“... for his plots. So when the camera started rolling, in Rohmer’s mind chance had become fate. Jean-Louis Trintignant complained about this laissez-aller during the 1968 shoot of what would become Rohmer’s most widely seen film, My Night at Maud’s. The actor said he felt ignored on set, but the director responded: ‘The ashtrays worry me a lot more ...”

“... glance at the list makes the authors’ initial scepticism intelligible enough. The first name is Jean de Gisons (1188-1220), the last Jean Cocteau; those listed are either aristocrats of the House of Lorraine (among whose ancestors are numbered Godfroi de Bouillon, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Merovingian ...”

“... di Prima and a group of friends (which included Audre Lorde) discovered the delirious visions of Jean Cocteau. It was a form of ‘magick’, but also a political awakening. ‘We came from a maddened people’, she later wrote, destroyed by greed, depression, ‘by being immigrants in a land of conformity’.Di Prima enrolled at Swarthmore College near ...”

“... 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 Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ...”

“... elegance, and it soon had a team of contributors that included Alain-Fournier, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry. Gide then proposed that they branch out into publishing ‘beautiful books’. Neither he nor his colleagues had the means to run a ...”

“... choses dont je suis le maître mais pas volontairement l’acteur]. The interviewer turned to Jean Cocteau and asked for his impressions. Cocteau’s reply is indicative: he seems to be struggling between the epic and post-epic frames of reference that the new mural put in question, hanging onto the possibility of ...”

“... he befriended a thief called Benny Barnett, who taught him to steal cars and introduced him to Jean Lucinda Johnson, a precocious 16-year-old whose ‘skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven’. She would become his first wife. Himes quit college at 17, and began to pack a .44 calibre ...”

“... the congealed juice of the seed-heads of Papaver somniferum, had had many literary advocates. Jean Cocteau called it the ‘least stupid’ thing that he knew of. But in this instance, as so often, literary people are more like everybody else than they sometimes like to think. In the 19th century, opium use was widespread throughout the social ...”

“... managed to avoid making even a token appearance among the gilded company – Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and other worthies – on a collaborationist charge. As her perfume once more flew off the shelves, Chanel moved discreetly to Switzerland for a time. She wasn’t even required to sever her relationship with von Dinklage, who ...”

“... writes a hard, lucid prose,’ says Chatwin. ‘Paris is full of strange encounters ... He meets Cocteau and Jean Marais, “a plebeian Antinous”, and Cocteau tells how Proust would receive visitors in bed, wearing yellow kid gloves to stop him from biting his nails, and how the dust ...”

“... Anna de Noailles, Marcel Schwob, Francis Jammes, Renée Vivien, André Gide, Maurice Ravel, Jean Cocteau); a host of gorgeous houses and flats to be described; a small army of doted-on cats and dogs to itemise (Fanchette, Sidi, Kiki-La-Doucette, Saha, Gamelle); and last but not least, the monstrous, labyrinthine, seemingly inexhaustible Colette ...”

“... He was lucky enough to count among his most intimate friends the writer (and Protestant) Jean Schlumberger and the novelist and Nobel Prizewinner Roger Martin du Gard, both of whom were bisexual, though less conspicuously so. They accompanied him on his adventures or exchanged letters with him about his encounters with adolescents, and they almost ...”