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“... About​ fifteen years ago, I bought a painting at auction. Apart from the usual anxieties, there was an overriding emotional factor. My wife, who had died a year or so earlier, had for many years collected images of women reading: mainly drawings, prints and watercolours, plus one small painting. I was browsing through the online catalogue of a French sale when I was stopped by two pictures by Odilon Redon, both of his wife, Camille, reading: one was predominantly pale green, and showed her sitting in the middle distance in a garden; the other, predominantly red and purple, showed her in close-up, with elongated features and eyes cast down on her book ...”

“... Sunday night at the Hotel Bulgaria in central Sofia. Until the next electricity cut arrives, it is cabaret time. A succession of competent, Westernised acts unwind before a small, mute audience who have paid five levs each for the right not to applaud. On come four muscular, blond-rinsed girls, who go through a mixed routine, from rough-hewn disco-dancing to some Isadora Duncan stuff ...”

“... Like many Francophiles, I’ve never read a book about Paris. Not a whole one, all the way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the hope of their being read has extended over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures ...”

“... One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous. As Flaubert’s literary nephew, and a member of the new group calling themselves Naturalists, he was already well known in Paris; three years previously, he had made his first appearance – as ‘le petit Maupassant’ – in the Goncourt Journal, delighting a company of already famous writers with a long story about Swinburne’s decadent behaviour in Etretat ...”

“... The great​ French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t see the point; he didn’t forbid it, but declined to go to the premiere. He sat through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile ...”

“... Nineteenth-century​ French art, and French artists, were fortunate to have the backing of some of the best writers of the day. Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gautier, Goncourt, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans and Mallarmé all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as well as a hulking and immobile target to attack: the annual Salon ...”

“... Towards​ the end of the first year of Anita Brookner’s deathtime, I was remembering my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didn’t talk about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes ...”

“... singer. He instructs Ludovic Halévy to look after an impoverished photographer: ‘Keep an eye on Barnes, while protecting him, so that he becomes quite simply happy.’In September 1870, with the Prussian army surrounding Paris, Degas enlisted in the Garde nationale. But when it came to shooting practice, he discovered that he couldn’t see the target with ...”

“... If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English ...”

“... Rembrandt’s Artist in His Studio, c.1629, is a small picture with a blazing message. The viewpoint is that of one seated on the bare floor in the corner of an attic studio with crumbling plaster walls. On the right, in shadow, is the doorway. In the centre, with its back to us, is an enormous easel with a picture propped on it. On the left, barely half the height of the easel, stands the painter, brush and mahlstick in hand, dressed in his painting robe and hat ...”

“... BeginningsIn the early 1960s my maternal grandparents were living in what estate agents call a chalet bungalow on the outskirts of Beaconsfield. The house was a new build in a sloping half-acre of woodland. My highly practical grandfather cleared an area of trees halfway down the slope, laid a concrete base and built a summer house, which he painted light blue ...”

“... Julian Barnes is a writer of rare intelligence. He catches the detail of contemporary life with an uncanny, forensic skill. His style is a model of cool and precision. He is often very funny, and if his humour tends somewhat to jokiness, then at least the jokes are good ones. At his best – in Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters – he uses his skills as a literary entertainer to put across complex, resonant ideas ...”

“... but why did interpretation have to end just there, what was to stop it going on indefinitely? On Julian Barnes, who is so addicted to the business or game of interpretations, the question does not seem to weigh so heavily. We perhaps misunderstand Barnes if we take him to be profoundly worried by hermeneutic ...”

“... no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes’. A new novel by Julian Barnes is a reminder that – up to a point, anyway – the situation has changed. Without being defiantly weird or consciously trying to alter the future, Barnes is clearly no slave to limit; he does something ...”

“... The 21-year-old narrator of Julian Barnes’s first novel, Metroland (1980), suggests that ‘everyone has a perfect age to which they aspire, and they’re only truly at ease with themselves when they get there. I suppose with most people it’s between 25 and 35.’ For him, though, he imagines it’s ‘a sprightly 65 ...”