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“... live a ‘poetic’ life, but not in any merely ironic or self-dramatising sense, not like Gérard de Nerval and his pet lobster. If he had been more of a poseur, his road would surely have been much smoother. Despite the formal conservatism of his verse, he was never able to settle comfortably into the English poetic scene. Even before the flagrant scandals ...”

“... likely that I first came across the idea of Humphrey Bogart not in a Bogart movie, but in A bout de souffle. Not in 1960, when it came out – I was more likely to have seen Spartacus then – but three or four years later, when the Godard movie was shown again (and again) at the Academy cinema on Oxford Street, the Hampstead Everyman or the NFT, while I was ...”

“... on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not exactly. Barthes on the page is a character in the novel of his life, not because he is an invented or rearranged ...”

“... Kauppi’s book. Like the cycles of the great Mafiosi or the history of the Comintern, the chanson de geste of the various avant gardes has a relatively immutable pattern: the first friendships and then the founding of something; the deliberate scandals and provocations; the manifestos; the enemy lists, the exclusions left and right; the hegemony of ...”

“... head of a prestigious college. ‘Sartre is dead.’ The other, a well-known and distinguished man about French history, was delighted. According to his own account, the two of them then enacted a little dance or jig to express their pleasure. The occasion may be compared with Mrs Bessie Braddock’s notorious celebration in the newly-elected House of ...”

“... a special unit of gendarmes entered the priory of Saint François at Nice in search of a certain Paul Touvier, who was living there under the name of Paul Lacroix. An arrest was made and within half an hour Touvier was on his way to Fresnes prison in Paris. He was eventually installed in its hospital. The gendarmes had ...”

“... or – very much second best – see someone discover. One of the people I interviewed was Louis de Branges, a Franco-American mathematician at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, with one significant proof already under his belt. De Branges was convinced that a mathematical field in which he was the acknowledged ...”

“... on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul deMan on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some ...”

“... view that philosophy and literature are founded in the nature of things or the spirit of man, deconstruction borrows from structuralism the argument that these disciplines, and ‘man himself’, are, in Culler’s words, ‘a product of discursive forces’. Deconstruction amends structuralism, however, by adding ...”

“... his party. Introductions were effected; I didn’t catch all the names and said to the small dark man who still had hold of my hand: ‘Sorry, did you say you were Paul from Romania?’ He released the mitt and drew himself up somewhat. ‘Paul of Romania.’ I burbled something about it ...”

“... those of the Roman Cessair, Parthalan the Greek, the giant Fomorians, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha De Dannan, the Gaels themselves under the command of the Spanish Soldier) – not since then had such a multinational company established a beachhead. This might be one of Mr Haughey’s more successful – and less contentious – import drives. Ten years ...”

“... of landing. What could have been a strong climax for the book has been left undramatised, even de-dramatised. When the narrator heads out into the city to ‘escape family’ the phrase seems a strange one, since family has hardly been introduced in the first place. From the beginning the odds seem weighted against what Nigeria has to offer, but even if ...”

“... Those who bowed to convention could expect to be rewarded. If an artist aspired to the Prix de Rome (or even if he didn’t) he should spend long hours copying paintings in the Louvre, whose dimly-lit galleries were obstacle courses where young men sat three-deep at wooden easels. Like the trophy wife, the well-bred artist served a purpose no less ...”

“... and Boulez, the apostle of mathematical determinism and absolute modernity, Fauré the diffident man and cautious innovator, Boulez the scathing polemicist and compulsive revolutionary: these standard conceptions of the respective composers would seem to exclude them from any common ground except that of genius. Yet as one looks further, the parallels ...”

“... thrown back on nothing but – a favourite quote – ‘the thing itself. Unaccommodated man’: ‘Despair was a foolish indulgence, less lethal than vain faith but demeaning. One could not oppose the armies of delusion with petulance. It was necessary to believe in oneself. Very, very difficult. One was a series of spasms, flashes. Without ...”