Search Results

“... its radical 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 ...”

“... of Westminster Abbey or There Will Be Blood? Even so, the author is not quite dead. It is true, as Paul Valéry pointed out, that many things are involved in the creation of a work of art besides an author; but this is to demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real ...”

“... eventually the head of the Lourcine-Pascal Hospital in Paris, which was renamed after his teacher Paul Broca. Physicians were sufficiently celebrated then that no fewer than 23 of them – including Pozzi, in two different poses – were featured in the second series of trading cards that came with the chocolate bars sold by the retail magnate Félix ...”

“... great question to which he addressed himself was the one to which other like-minded theorists – Paul Valéry most acutely of all – had addressed themselves: how can the novelist justify what he puts into his novels. ‘How to save from contingency a work whose sentences follow one another without rigour, in which almost all the words could be ...”

“... ma vie’. Earlier titles included works by Stefan Zweig on Tolstoy, Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer, Paul Valéry on Descartes, and contributions from living writers such as Marie-Hélène Lafon (on Flaubert) and Michel Schneider (on Pascal). The series was started in 2016, and the most recent book in the set, before Kristeva’s, was a 1939 essay by ...”

“... as ‘the illusion that one is composing’ the work in question: a definition she borrows from Paul Valéry, who is, with Wallace Stevens, the tutelary deity of the book. The Odes of John Keats is itself certainly and thoroughly ‘composed’; it is thick with often beautiful clarities of perception organised into sometimes compelling coherences of ...”

“... her, the most famous of which, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), was, according to Paul Valéry, the best thing since Vermeer. They are his equivalent of Monet’s cathedral fronts, a set of pictures of the same scene but with different weather. They are also an intense exchange between subject and artist – some think Manet was in love ...”

“... Yeats​ was a great admirer of Paul Valéry’s poem ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (‘The Graveyard by the Sea’), but only up to a point – the point where he thought that the poem’s main injunction was not about lingering among the tombs and talking to the dead, but about getting on with life, or trying to ...”

“... laid brilliantly waste – and why not? – the claims to poetic greatness of the recently dead Paul Valéry, and then writing the Introduction for her second piece of fiction, Portrait d’un inconnu, of 1947. This was Tropisms made continuous and drawn out to the length of a novel: a profound and engaging demonstration of the troubling things that ...”

“... with her family in Paris in 1875, was an heiress to the sewing machine fortune, a patron of Paul Valéry and composers including Ravel, Fauré, Poulenc and Stravinsky; she also paid for X-ray units for Marie Curie. Virginia Woolf described her much later as ‘the image of a stately mellow old Tory’, and her face was said to be the model for the ...”

“... commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible rhythm’. Some of the Penguin contes seem ...”

“... to derive the Montagnard tribe’s dialect for his novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium); and Paul Braffort worked with the Atelier de Recherches et Techniques Avancées (ARTA) on computer stories that ‘read’ with you through a branching decision tree.2 The newest member of the Oulipo, Daniel Levin Becker, born in Chicago in 1984, opens his Many ...”

“... Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of flowery autobiographical pensées.) She also bagged the ...”

“... matrons … found beguiling’, was immediately nicknamed ‘Mr Goodcock’ (by Colette’s friend Paul Valéry) suggests that he too – at least at the outset of the relationship – bore all the requisites of the type. Demoralising, indeed, these clinging jersey bathing-suits, Venusian breasts and bobbing male appendages. Yet the Colette biographer ...”

“... Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces for student magazines. When the Germans occupied Belgium in 1940 he and his wife fled, but were turned back at the Spanish frontier and resumed life in Brussels ...”