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“... was the instant just before it. ‘Prime’ takes its bearings from his enraptured reading of Paul Valéry’s notebooks (‘one of the most interesting and original documents of “the inner life” in existence’), and particularly, I think, from the eventfulness of an inkling Valéry has at dawn: an ...”

“... the experience (or lack of it) reflected in facial wrinkles (or lack of them). The photograph of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing playing tennis is revealing, not simply because it shows a member of the élite playing the sport of the élite: it is, above all, illuminating because it expresses a tautness of control which reflects the habit of power better than ...”

“... and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon Review in 1953. Valéry says a poem isn’t finished but abandoned: many of Lowell’s were never even abandoned. The resulting jostle of competing versions marks him more than any other poet, even Auden. Whole books, especially the five books of sonnets, have that ...”

“... the means of belonging.It’s not as though migrants dig in, rank and file, against integration. Paul Scheffer, professor of European studies at Tilburg, makes this point in Immigrant Nations, a judicious account of what migrants and European hosts still have to sort out about their long and ambivalent encounter. He cites the case of Fouad Laroui, a Moroccan ...”

“... in Nantes and the niece of the celebrated Belle Epoque writer Marcel Schwob, dissipated friend to Valéry, Wilde and Colette. (Ah, the digressive pleasures of Wikipedia: Marcel’s death in 1905, according to H. Montgomery Hyde in The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, resulted from ‘a syphilitic tumour in the rectum, resulting from his relations with a ...”