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“... whose name was Moses Belloc or Bloch, and reminds us that Bloch is the name chosen by Proust to mark the unambiguously Jewish family with which the young Marcel tangled for a time, so perhaps during the months that the young Belloc chose to spend as a ranker in the French artillery he was occasionally baited ...”

“... Paris with exquisite taste in literature, music and art. Then he became friends not only with Proust, but also with Gide, who in 1908 started the monthly Nouvelle Revue Française in the hope of helping a ‘rising generation’ to escape the suffocating plushness of ‘yesterday’s writers’. The distinctive dust jackets of the NRF – plain white with ...”

“... attractive? Nevertheless, Colette, the real Colette, who features in the text as Colette, just as Proust figured in his narrative as Marcel, was in difficulty; she could not get it onto the page. One part of her wanted to write about what she found easy – her friends, the Mediterranean landscape, the sea and sun, the ...”

“... Hamlet is missing from the play. With distance, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Marcel Duchamp is the seminal figure. There is hardly a strain in Modernism and Post-Modernism which does not find precedent and self-ironising justification in Duchamp’s jests out of the abyss. Limitations on length must have inhibited Helga Geyer-Ryan. Her ...”

“... Mentalité was a new and fashionable word in France in the 1920s. ‘Mentalité me plaît,’ Proust wrote in Le Côté de Guermantes. One man who helped put the term mentalité on the intellectual map in France was the philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a member of the Année Sociologique circle; he tended to use the term where Durkheim would have written ...”

“... and in a fairly restricted category (though one he could have shared with several contemporaries, Proust, Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence among them). When he was dying of TB of the larynx he was fetching up a good deal of phlegm. ‘I think,’ he said (and the joke is more poignant for being so physically painful to make), ‘I think I deserve the ...”

“... hence ‘meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .’ But Genette, whose examples are mostly drawn from Proust, and are evidence of a higher degree of literary intelligence than is quite general, refines these insights and assumptions, and provides elegant labels for certain manoeuvres we had probably not imagined they needed. So we may now, if we wish, speak of ...”

“... without a philosophy. But he also wanted to write stories, and to make storytelling respectable. Proust wrote that the conte philosophique was a genre in which ‘ideas are substitutes for griefs’. Voltaire’s science fiction fable ‘Micromégas’, a parable about scale, is the Penguin anthology’s great success story in this new vein. A group of ...”

“... de Sociologie in the 1930s, whose members made literature out of the teachings of Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and to the cult in those same years of négritude; and philosophy, whose literary as opposed to philosophical aspects are dealt with soundly enough, so far as Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, the Ideologues and later, the Existentialists, are ...”

“... coming back.’ In the early years of the 21st century, Jorge Luis Borges and Bioy Casares joined Marcel Proust and Lillian Hellman to become a distinguished band of writers whose maids wrote books about them. Bioy’s maid Jovina got in first; her book, Los Bioy, which is a wonderful account of half a century of service, appeared in 2002. It is clear ...”

“... which had not come starry-eyed to the famous presence.He went on to one of the main texts, Marcel Mauss’s famous, brief Essai sur le don (The Gift). Derrida said the gifts Mauss described were really exchanges. A real gift should be something given freely, outside the economic circle of debt, repayment, interest, amortisation and so on. A gift that ...”

“... house be confiscated: but there was an outcry at the closure of the house which had published Proust, Malraux and Mauriac. The confiscation order was replaced by a fine and then by a pardon. Grasset remains a major imprint. In the entertainment world hostility fastened on actors and singers who had worked for Radio Paris or for Continental Films, both ...”

“... designed furniture, theatrical costumes and sets; she was a society lady, an art-world insider, a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea party, inviting a (carefully ...”

“... and the nature of the whole society, that is a mystery, but not the objects themselves. It’s Proust in plaster (except it’s terracotta). 15 September. Discover a good bookshop, Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite The Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry ...”

“... mucus – pours from his nose into the bucket.Sonia is talking about Asthmador, the same substance Proust was partial to. But this is not the kind of novel in which Marcel is likely to cameo.Instead, we encounter a cast of gritty individuals, obsessive, damaged and more than a little cracked. A friend of Sonia’s breaks ...”