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“... Bovary, c’est moi’: The Great Characters of Literature and Where They Came From by André Bernard (Norton, $19.95). Literary models don’t get much more famous than the Delamare case: in that (obvious) sense, the pronouncement of Flaubert’s which Bernard takes for his title is transparently absurd. In ...”

“... The pale child gives a faint wave of his hand. He is saying goodbye to his Jewish friend, about to be taken from school to die in Auschwitz, but there is also a whole history of helplessness in the gesture: not only the boy’s but that of his class and time and culture and place. The gesture occurs at the end of Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, 1987 – the year of the story is 1944 – but it has echoes and relatives everywhere in French films since the war, and in French fiction of the same period ...”

“... to the same television studios where he held forth before the cameras in a way that would have put André Malraux to shame. Gary was probably better in the talk department than Isaiah Berlin: the Carl Lewis, one might say, of talkers. One can admire Carl Lewis as an athlete, however, without being overcome by any great desire to run against him. On the other ...”

“... for the 500th edition of French television’s authorial chat-show Apostrophes, whose anchorman, Bernard Pivot, like Roland, gets a fearsome pasting, of which more in a moment. And each of the book’s close on two hundred chapters has for a headline some cultural event, urgently dated to the year, the month, if possible the day when it ...”

“... Berry’s death in 1927 may have left Wharton ‘utterly rudderless’, as she wrote to Bernard Berenson; but she still managed to get into his Paris apartment and to burn almost all the letters she had ever written to him. ‘No words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the influence of his thought, his character, his deepest ...”

“... phenomena he sought to describe. The Pompidou show, carefully curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Bernard Marcadé, is billed as the first specifically dedicated to Lacan, which is surprising. But the influence of Lacan’s ideas on art, artists and art criticism has been so pervasive that on walking round the show it becomes clear that we have been attending ...”

“... to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair. The problem is that Lévy and Finkielkraut ...”

“... Bernard de Fallois​ , a legendary French editor and publisher, died in January 2018. He worked for a long time at Hachette, and set up his own company in 1987. At one point, he was considering doing postgraduate work on Proust; he said in one of the lectures now published as Sept conférences sur Marcel Proust that he had been ‘tempted to conduct … a university exercise that one calls a thesis’, and the wording alone tells us a lot ...”

“... in France during the period. In the Fifties (the timespan of Volume I), the key players were André Bazin (effectively the journal’s founding father) and François Truffaut. They had a distinctive and controversial agenda: to promote an idea of film as simultaneously a sophisticated, autonomous art-form and the form most suited to a modern democratic ...”

“... Pointu, a group of blocks in Clichy-sous-Bois, 15 kilometres from the centre of the city, built by Bernard Zehrfuss in the 1960s and early 1970s. Few of my Parisian friends have heard of the Chêne Pointu, but they’ve seen it – whenever there’s a movie about trouble in the banlieues, the estate provides the set. The skyscrapers loom over scraggy ...”

“... here. Once Blair is in office, the most engaging character in the story is Cherie’s hairdresser, André, who travels with her (she pays – and boy does she mind) and brings order to what Cherie would be the first to admit is ambient chaos. Cherie’s clothes and appearance are one of the subjects on which she was lavishly attacked by the papers; this seemed ...”

“... of an Age of Revolution than Mansfield Park does. Life can be a good deal more surreal than 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 ...”

“... another soldier who was calmly reading a book. He found he was talking to a fellow-Parisian. Guy-Bernard Delapierre, an Egyptologist. The two were shortly separated, but he was later handed a note from Delapierre giving him Delapierre’s address in Paris, and they were to become close friends during the second half of the war. On his arrival at Görlitz he ...”

“... who pondered the Indians and loved playing with his cat (Montaigne amicus, as apostrophised by Bernard Levin in Enthusiasms) for André Tournon’s self-confessed textual ‘cybernetic nightmare ... a text which reads and comments upon itself, a meditating machine operating by itself with interlocking, superimposed ...”

“... witnesses and unexpected reactions from old witnesses to the text. For instance, Georges Mikes and André Deutsch, no less, had been sitting on yet another authentic rejection of Animal Farm by a leading publisher. I had thought that Reg Groves, who worked in the Hampstead bookshop immediately before Orwell and was one of the original ‘Balham ...”