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“... Zola’s moral stand over the Dreyfus Affair and the informing presuppositions of his fiction. Pagès invites us to connect the journalism with the world of the novels, remarking that the ‘roots’ of Zola’s repudiation of anti-semitism ‘go deep into his work’. Yet the language of biology, which in the second half of the 19th century furnished ...”

“... of Le Grand Meaulnes, which was published in 1913. Meanwhile, Fournier – he used the pen-name Alain-Fournier from 1905, partly to avoid confusion with a racing driver – had become a journalist and had a succession of mistresses, the last being the strong-minded actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took ...”

“... In the fifth chapter of The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton goes on a trip to the Lake District. He takes his girlfriend, ‘M’, and a paperback copy of The Prelude. Applying his talent for summary to the latter, he explains that it prescribes ‘regular travel through nature’ as ‘a necessary antidote to the evils of the city ...”

“... that the narrator is under an obligation to interact, with a helpful bidoon called Ali and with Alain, Batros’s teenage son, who is undertaking an internship which he experiences more as an internment. Alain Batros is fat and under orders from his father not to be. There is a reward waiting for him if he falls below ...”

“... By the time​ he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: he had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it. The literary movement he’d launched half a century earlier – the nouveau roman – had ground to a halt. The new novel – anti-psychological and anti-expressive, stripped of individualised characters, temporal continuity and meaning itself – was no longer new ...”

“... Alain Corbin is a prolific new-style French historian, and these books are notable contributions to an interesting genre he describes as ‘the history of sensibilities’. The Foul and the Fragrant created something of a stir some years ago when the translation appeared in hardback, partly, I suppose, because no respected historian had ever before written so much, and so explicitly, about shit, which, as more sanitised historians had omitted to specify, occupied in former times the worry-space now claimed by nuclear waste ...”

“... To encourage French voters to approve the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, President Chirac warned them against the risk of France becoming the ‘black sheep’ of Europe. But, as Einstein once wrote, ‘in order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, first of all, be a sheep.’ In the event, the French, whichever way they voted, did not behave like a flock of sheep ...”

“... was, and the French writers being published in translation by John Calder were a revelation. Alain Robbe-Grillet was God, and his Snapshots and Towards a New Novel (1965) – fiction and criticism between the same covers – was an essential primer. Inanimate objects ruled the world with a greater coherence and rationality than messy, mucky human ...”

“... weren’t the ones breaking into Democrat headquarters, planting bugs and stealing files. When Alain Juppé (or ‘Juppe’, as Lloyd calls him) was found guilty of dodgy dealing, he was widely expected to retire from politics as he had promised to before judgment was handed down (he was given an eight-month suspended sentence). Juppé announced his ...”

“... the veil to an SS uniform.On 18 October, on the television show C à vous, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said: ‘The hijab is not France.’On 19 October, hundreds of people demonstrated against Islamophobia at Place de la République in Paris. One of them was Clémentine Autain, a politician from La France Insoumise (‘France unbowed’), who ...”

“... his publisher is keen to make known). His pages seem to be congratulating themselves, like Alain de Botton’s. Sometimes the action scenes, too, are overdone. Early on, Fowler gives more than two pages to the funeral of a minor character. It takes place in a vast meteorite crater. There are thousands of plastic chairs around the coffin, with religious ...”

“... Bioy Casares’s novel, The Invention of Morel (1940), has a similarly silly ending, but when Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet took a similar story as the basis for Last Year at Marienbad they excised the futuristic gadgetry, presenting the same events with no mundane underpinning. Even memory can make such ...”

“... Origin​ stories of artists are ubiquitous, but those of art historians are not. Yve-Alain Bois, the pre-eminent French art historian of his generation, narrates his own beginning in this book about his key encounters with artists, theorists and curators. Born in 1952, Bois travels with his mother and little brother from a small town near Bordeaux to Paris (he thinks he was nine, she puts him at five ...”

“... prison ship. Malraux then married his brother’s widow Madeleine, and adopted her son (his nephew Alain) to be brought up with the sons he had by Josette Clotis. Madeleine and Alain described to me the private face of André Malraux – shyer, more vulnerable and more self-critical than the public mask. He was awkward with ...”

“... the context of a disastrous interview that Darrieussecq conducted with the former Prime Minister, Alain Juppé. She agreed to talk to Juppé for Elle, but did not get to read the final edit, where they cut out her questions about ‘la crise sociale’ and industrial unrest, leaving only low-calorie chat about his jogging and reading ...”