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“... ways for different people. A couple of years earlier, in a letter to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Simone de Beauvoir had pronounced it ‘less and less likely’ that Hitler could want a war. Now she took the news that the summer examinations of 1940 had been cancelled to be ‘definitive and without hope’. St Exupéry’s friend Léon Werth was heartened by ‘a ...”

“... she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp: a one-woman posse, ready to drop anything at a phone call (including the classes I was supposed to be teaching at Stanford) and drive her around to various Tower record stores and dim sum restaurants. Most important, I became adept at clucking ...”

“... about two sisters, as different as any two humans could possibly be, who fall into the orbit of a man whose sexual power may be likened to gravity. Williams wanted a great director for his play but weeks passed with no word from Kazan, who was called Gadget or Gadge by everybody in the theatre world. When Williams called Kazan at home, Molly, Kazan’s ...”

“... hotel and miss his train, as he did not want Wilde to think he was avoiding him. ‘This terrible man,’ he wrote, ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in ...”

“... horseshit you print in Harper’s Bazaar.’ Mailer’s early success made his struggle ‘to be a man’, as he often called it (dreaming again of Hemingway), into a struggle to distinguish reality from everything around it. Lennon understands what Mailer was up against: he was up against himself, up against the failure of the novels after his first one to ...”

“... including that collie) is only 25, and not long divorced, but she ‘cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.’ Her amnesia isn’t straightforwardly self-protective, since one of the things she does remember is her husband saying, when she was in hospital to give ...”

“... that ‘there are a thousand unnoticed openings ... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul’ should degenerate into nonsense, and Fielding differentiated his honest characters, the naive and the stupid, from their victimisers, the hypocritical and fraudulent, according to whether they depended on physical appearance to reveal or conceal ...”

“... is seen as a source of national shame. Interviewed in Le Monde, Jacques Thuillier of the Collège de France complained that, ‘à l’étranger’, Poussin’s reputation had been dulled if not sullied; the quatercentenary of his birth was an opportunity to clean and polish his image to its true lustre, to show the world that the artist was (in the words of ...”

“... Michel Leiris recalls his mother warning him to beware of ‘bad people’ in the Bois de Boulogne. He imagined the predators in the woods to be ‘satyrs’, and later, cannibals: he had been struck by an exotic colour illustration in Le Pêle-Mêle, a humorous weekly, of ‘savages’ eating an explorer. Leiris (b. 1901) went on to become an ...”

“... and patriotism. The picture returned to France the same year, into the collection of Isaac de Camondo, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay.It’s inviting to assume that by the 1870s British and French art were on separate and deeply divergent tracks: Pre-Raphaelitism versus Impressionism, sentimental moralism versus non-narrative realism; though with ...”

“... won a couple of majors and became the number one golfer in the world. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. Then came the London Olympics, about which there was a lot of national grumbling, until they started. Britain ended up third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This ...”

“... I called Julian Harp, who solves the problem of engineless flight. He recognises that when a man lies on his stomach and flaps his arms, the wing-tips point forward instead of back like a bird’s: so he must contrive the means to fly lying on his back, and he succeeds, constructing models, and then his final set of wings, out of the struts of umbrellas ...”

“... keeping it for him. He visited us occasionally in Dundee, a better-looking and more powerful man than his older brother Jack, my grandfather, and projecting a sense of confidence and certainty. Although there was an Indian restaurant in Broughty Ferry my parents never ate there or ordered in and, when Robin visited, my mother cooked the lamb curry ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected ...”

“... the fragile security of the nursery, suffers a metaphoric death when taken from his domestic Eden. De Quincey, who writes obsessively of such processes of bereavement, is inclined to make a fact of the metaphor: ‘The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at ...”