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“... after meeting the American heiress Natalie Barney, the ‘impératrice des lesbiennes’ in Paris, Truman Capote still sounded starstruck. In the years just after the Second World War he went regularly to Barney’s weekly salon at 20 rue Jacob. Inside the house, a cross between ‘a chapel and a bordello’, with a domed stained-glass ceiling and a ...”

“... Chairs on their list (perhaps they are planning to add Gray’s Survey of Contemporary Music or Bernard Van Dieren’s Down Among the Dead Men), felt that an investment in the Lambert field ought to be consolidated. Nevertheless, the rambunctious Lambert lives were and are entertaining. The life of the patriarch, George Washington, father of the like-named ...”

“... leave the EU the French were confident that the influence of English would diminish. Within weeks Paris had worked out that a number of Anglophone countries – Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada – that had used Britain as a door into the EU would need another way in. New French courses for businessmen were suddenly on offer in all those ...”

“... 1942 and 22 August 1944: Convoy One, Drancy, the main transit camp on the north-east outskirts of Paris, to Auschwitz, 1112 men, mostly French nationals, none chosen for immediate gassing, 22 survivors in 1945, through Convoy 46, 9 February 1943, 1000 deportees, of whom 816 were gassed on arrival and 22 survived (15 men, seven women), to the last ...”

“... in 1969, had been filmed over the previous three years. Clark and his crew had found themselves in Paris in May 1968 in the thick of the événements. His producer, Michael Gill, recalls ‘riot police … just off-camera’, adding, laconically: ‘I was gassed.’ Despite being so apparently out of sympathy with the temper of ‘these days’, Civilisation ...”

“... the primacy of the family. By the time the narrative reaches its crisis, her chief opponent is her Paris-educated father, who has provided her with an eclectic education but insisted on a son-in-law of his choice. When Ramza first learns that she has been promised to an unknown suitor, she resorts, characteristically, to her father’s library, where she ...”

“... the reappearance of a book she had firmly consigned to ‘the débris of the theological’. The Paris Press edition of On Being Ill suffers from no such liability. The pamphlet it seeks to replicate, typeset by Woolf herself for the Hogarth Press in 1930, was the third version of ‘On Being Ill’ to appear in print – the first was published by ...”

“... Bernard de Fallois​ , a legendary French editor and publisher, died in January 2018. He worked for a long time at Hachette, and set up his own company in 1987. At one point, he was considering doing postgraduate work on Proust; he said in one of the lectures now published as Sept conférences sur Marcel Proust that he had been ‘tempted to conduct … a university exercise that one calls a thesis’, and the wording alone tells us a lot ...”

“... when the Facel Vega sports car in which he was a passenger went off the road between Sens and Paris. Among his things was found Le Premier homme, the manuscript he had been working on for nearly a year at the time of the accident and on which there was still some way to go. Only now are we given it to read. It is extraordinary that it should have taken so ...”

“... physiology, and whose site was the clinic. In that reorientation, pride of place went to the Paris Hospital and the French school of medical science. Both these insights have now been taken further by important but sharply contrasting new monographs. Dorinda Outram’s is ostensibly the narrower, grappling with just one scientist, Georges Cuvier, and ...”

“... to a popular saying, the Mediterranean separated France from Algeria just as the Seine in Paris divided the Left Bank from the Right. When the rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale launched their war of independence in November 1954, France referred to them as hors-la-loi, outlaws rather than combatants. By the time Algeria won its independence ...”

“... to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd. know what I think of criticism in general & not try to arouse my interest with a perfectly innocuous ...”

“... magnetism that Anne, having spent most of her life in French-speaking courts, in Brussels and Paris, was to all intents and purposes French. Lancelot de Carles wrote that ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ‘La Bolaing’. So far so good. But how it was that Anne held out for ...”

“... not said – about the recovery of the Proust pages, parts of which were published in 1954 by Bernard de Fallois, in whose archives the full text was discovered when he died. In the Céline case there is a lot to be said and seemingly only one secret remaining: who gave the papers to the person who made public their existence?Céline and his ...”

“... for coffee at an estaminet which, unknown to him but not to passing Staff, a notorious lady from Paris had ‘staffed with some winsome daughters of Rahab’? This incident is one of a hundred-odd entries listed under ‘Anecdotes’ in the index, which is clearly Dunn’s own loving work. He was a man with an eye for landscape, weather and fauna; under ...”