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“... that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal. Picasso always wanted the statue to be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play ...”

“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... 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 with ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers ...”

“... rebellion against the Nazi invaders. Our headmaster – how did he get hold of it ? – read us Paul Éluard’s heart-rending poem ‘Liberté’, smuggled across the Channel to the Free French in London. And two very different Resistance memoirs, published in the first year after the war, soon invaded and occupied my adolescent imagination. One was ...”

“... had a wife and was called James. He was ‘sober, steady, strong and active’. Of course he was a man. Only after Allen’s death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to express different opinions: they’d always noticed his lack of facial hair, they said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised Allen in ...”

“... to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister.’ That isn’t quite the set-up in Paul Theroux’s very disconcerting new novel, Mother Land. There are two success stories among the seven surviving Justus siblings (one died in infancy), neither colossal, and operating in adjacent areas of cultural activity: the poet and literature professor ...”

“... scene: a strangely empty stretch of the Seine, at the crossing-point between Suresnes and the Bois de Boulogne, where Parisians imagined themselves in the country. The view is from one side of the river, cropped so that the prow of a boat and the prongs of a tree intrude from the left; reflections seep and blur across its surface, like colours mixed into the ...”

“... Cordova to Kampala and Rio. One of them, ‘the infamous Ramírez Hoffman’, was born in Santiago de Chile in 1950, three years before Bolaño, and like Bolaño later lived in Lloret del Mar in Spain. He died in 1998, while Bolaño died in 2003; and he was the vicious madman that Bolaño perhaps thought he himself could have been. The curious ...”

“... his admirable study – his ‘other Pushkin’ is the storyteller and novelist, not the poet – Paul Debreczeny quotes Pushkin’s comments on Shakespeare’s characterisation. They go hand in hand with inconclusiveness, and show why it is that though Shakespeare had to finish the play, his characters never do. They are not completed by their dramatic ...”

“... fills a hundred pages of one goatskin volume, a blacklist of nearly three thousand names. ‘A man’s first duty is to his tailor,’ Oscar Wilde (another patron) quipped, but obviously not when it came to paying. Winston Churchill was a regular customer, even having his suits cleaned and pressed at Poole’s, until an overzealous clerk sent a letter to ...”

“... a certain magnetism, it was true, but he looked nothing like the ‘handsome animal’ in the Man Ray photographs Gilot had seen in Cahiers d’art: ‘dark hair, bright flashing eyes, very squarely built’. Picasso came over to Gilot’s table, where she was dining with her friend Geneviève Aliquot and the actor Alain Cuny, bringing a bowl of ...”

“... use of the journal form for a kind of poetic and philosophical reverie, in works like La Rage de I’Expression (1952) and La Fabrique du Pré (1971), which lies behind Derrida’s recent choice of the same device. It is worth pointing out at this stage that both Genet’s two-column text and Ponge’s ‘Le Pré’ were first published in the magazine ...”

“... of the absence of determination? Sartre’s uniqueness consisted in the fact that, by a coup de force which presupposed a good deal of force and a good deal of violence (the unassuming old man at protest meetings and on marches has made us forget the young normalien’s ‘masterly self-assurance’, which the critics ...”

“... Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists ...”