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“... but he still methodically noted in the margin that the barometer stood at 27’ 2’’ (Paris measurement scale) at 7.00 a.m. after a bad storm. Yet all these thousands and thousands of measurements failed to yield reliable regularities. Part of the problem was that non-standardised instruments were being wielded by uncalibrated observers, as ...”

“... back home, Marian would be able to complete her BA. At least, that was the plan.They arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1924, after spending the summer – and too much of Marian’s money – in Dieppe. For most of the next few years Marian was stuck at home with the children (Adam, officially named Milman, was born in February 1928) while Milman was in ...”

“... pauvre bête,’ François Magendie, whose physiological demonstrations to medical students in Paris attracted particular opprobrium, used to say to the dog writhing under his knife. Magendie’s pupil, Claude Bernard, perhaps the greatest physiologist of his time, was hounded by an outraged public, among them his own ...”

“... hatreds’, like the Bosnians’. Only occasionally – on the grounds that Beirut was ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ – were they also ‘just like us’. A Lebanese friend drives me through Beirut. The Baghdad highway at peak bandit time is nerve-racking, but this is scarier. I suppose all these lunatics have reflexes sharpened by years of ...”

“... that she was highly accomplished and already well-known in Austria, a prizewinner in the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In one of the catalogue essays the potter Edmund de Waal sets her in the Viennese context. Her career began there at a moment of flux, somewhere towards the end of the Wiener Werkstätte and the beginning of Modernism. It was this ...”

“... of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, when it became part of the newly restored Poland. The historian Bernard Wasserstein first heard of the town as a child in the 1950s, when his mother told him it was where his father came from. Abraham (‘Addi’) Wasserstein wouldn’t speak of the place. His son grew up wondering about ‘this almost unmentionable, and ...”

“... not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped for ...”

“... philosophy was maintained under Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, as towers came to dominate the Paris skyline and the French population as a whole fell under the sway of gigantism and gadgets. But as John Ardagh points out in the revised edition of France Today, when Mitterrand challenged Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the confrontation was between a more ...”

“... desire, a trip on the Metro, is asked by her mother what she has done during her brief stay in Paris. J’ ai vieilli, she says. Not: I have lived or learned or suffered or even necessarily, as Barbara Wright’s otherwise excellent translation has it, ‘I’ve aged’. Zazie may have aged but the idea is more sententious than anything else she says, and ...”

“... in at Hawaii en route for Saigon, he went ashore and bought a book about Vietnam by the late Bernard Fall. ‘Shit, this is what I’m getting into.’A revolutionary moment requires both extraordinary times and extraordinary people, and Ron Ridenhour, despite his laconic attitude, was one of the latter. He wouldn’t have denied, however, that there was ...”

“... Museum’.This was not a fleeting love affair, soon forgotten. In 1908, Lenin came over from Paris for more than a month to work in the British Museum on his philosophical treatise Materialism and Empirio-criticism. He also presented his own published works to the library, as detailed in an appendix to Henderson’s book: at least four separate ...”

“... as ‘a reliable guide to his practice’. There are essays on Leavis, the poets of the Forties (Bernard Spencer, Alun Lewis, G.S. Fraser), on the Catholic novel, on George Steiner; the book is not quite the integral study its title may suggest. I have nothing against such collections; a lot of good critical writing disappears because of a prejudice against ...”

“... Proust’s unpublished work does not exist,’ Bernard de Fallois wrote in 1954. Provocative words, since he was introducing a whole volume of such material, and two years earlier had brought out Jean Santeuil, an unfinished novel Proust worked on between 1895 and 1899. De Fallois was trying to suggest, with a little too much bravado, that all Proust’s writing, early and late, published and unpublished, should be considered part of his great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu ...”

“... isn’t perfunctory. Does the victim have any enemies? Sollers and Kristeva – flanked by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has also showed up, as he does throughout the novel – indicate that he does. Who? ‘The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! … Um, Hélène Cixous!’ Bayard writes these ...”

“... with me what will I have left?’ Wounding words were something of a fashion in late 19th-century Paris – each wit delivering his barbed mots in his own style. Whistler concluded his with ‘a shrill “Eh what?” ... Zola with a patronising hein mon bon ... Degas with a loud dites quoi?’ Jacques-Emile Blanche compared him to a cavalry major on the drill ...”