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“... of the 19th century. Lotto was re-created as a Renaissance neurotic in the likeness of the age by Bernard Berenson, who wrote a book about him in 1895. (‘I happen to have a temperament,’ Berenson grandly wrote, ‘which inclines me to forgive much in an artist like Lotto.’) Since then he has often had the dubious honour of being considered one of the ...”

“... honeymoon tour of Europe. But the Franco-Prussian War cramped the Chopins’ style; they left Paris as the city was about to be besieged and sailed back to New Orleans. Kate was already pregnant with her first child. By 1882, when Oscar died of yellow fever, there were six children. The young widow took over his business; Toth argues that she may also ...”

“... service: MacDonald was much at sea and missed some of his cues. Then came John Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw, presumably the literary kings of the time. Galsworthy behaved impeccably, doing everything absolutely right. Shaw got enjoyment by looking around most of the time. The next pair were Edmund Gosse and J.M. Barrie. Barrie had arranged the whole ...”

“... prints have survived, and so has he. Recently his work has been shown at the Cartier Foundation in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. A small exhibition at the Arts Club in Dover Street (until 31 January, by appointment) gives a good idea of his studio portraits, despite the fact that the prints – twenty or so – are on display in a room that serves ...”

“... who later became men of law. Edmond Giscard, father of the French President, ‘came up’ to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, attended the semi-serious, semi-fashionable lectures at the École des Sciences Politiques, and then married a Mademoiselle Bardoux. The Bardoux were a typical Third Republic ‘bourgeois dynasty’. The father, Agénor ...”

“... near Limoges, she was raised in poverty by her mother. While she was still young they moved to Paris, to the working-class neighbourhood of Montmartre (since 1961, the square at the base of the Sacré Coeur funicular has been known as Place Suzanne-Valadon). At eighteen, she had a son. Maurice Utrillo became one of the famous painters of Montmartre, and ...”

“... began my dime novel’ – i.e. the story of his travels from Baku to Turkey and on to Paris – ‘which was distinguished from thousands of other dime novels in neither style nor structure. The only difference is that mine actually took place.’ Eunuchs, seraglios, daggers and murders abound, and so does improbably formulaic dialogue. ‘The ...”

“... it was in a very real sense, the 20th century’s own autobiography.’ Couldn’t her editors (or Bernard Levin who helped her and whose ‘passion for the English language’ she cites) have improved on the ‘mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth’, or were they seduced by Huffington’s glamour (it bursts forth from the dust jacket)? If ...”

“... on 17 October, a few weeks after the publication of his memoirs. He died on the steps of the Paris courthouse where he had been testifying on behalf of his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, who had been violently attacked in a book on French Fascism. The case was not a simple one, as de Jouvenel had said and done some imprudent things in the Thirties. Yet ...”

“... radiated with a spectral white-on-black glow. When war broke out again the Themersons were in Paris. Franciszka began work as a cartographer for the Polish government-in-exile. After Paris fell, she and other officials sailed to England on the MS Batory, the Polish liner that would take Roald Dahl to America two years ...”

“... late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it ...”

“... André Breton. Walter Benjamin considered that Baudelaire’s poetry reflected the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work. Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled something familiar. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the ...”

“... This was a work whose reputation travelled, from Leipzig to Lisbon, from St Petersburg to Paris. Dubious anecdotes about apples and rhetorical flourishes about God’s handiwork proliferated in its wake. One witty Frenchman, Newton’s first biographer, compared his subject’s genius with the Nile – none knew its source, and it only showed itself ...”

“... from midday till late evening, when he is slow and very slurred,’ according to the diary of Bernard Donoughue, one of his kitchen cabinet. Like Heath, Wilson was ill – ‘run-down’, as people used to say. Persistent colds, stomach pains, a racing heart, moments of forgetfulness and bewilderment: all of these attended cabinet meetings along with the ...”

“... Hebdo. In October, Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine suburb of Paris, was beheaded after he showed two Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to pupils during a civics class on freedom of expression. A few days later, three people were murdered, and several injured, in a knife attack at the basilica of Notre-Dame in ...”