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“... which he hated, he had to forge a sort of mask. He needed that.’ Contradictory verdicts on André Malraux, from witnesses I questioned about him in Paris when making a documentary for BBC Radio 3. Whether hostile or favourable, all of them were vehement. ‘I cannot name one person, left, right, or centre,’ said the reporter and novelist Olivier ...”

“... At André Malraux’s funeral, in November 1976, two red wreaths were delivered to the cemetery: one came from the French Communist Party, an organisation to which he never belonged, the other from Lasserre, a three-rosette restaurant near the Grand Palais where he had liked to lunch – on his own should company fail ...”

“... vignettes of the art world. The section devoted to ‘Encounters’ – with Nadezhda Mandelstam, André Malraux, Werner Herzog, the architect Konstantin Melnikov and the fashion-designer Madeleine Vionnet – is balanced by odder meetings: an investigation into an Indian ‘wolf-boy’, a report on a sinister-ludicrous Boston messiah, and on a Chinese ...”

“... editor of the LRB, the head of the French Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, was sacked – by André Malraux, the novelist turned Gaullist minister of culture. A piece in the Guardian by their great Paris correspondent, Peter Lennon, described what happened next. There had been a demonstration outside the padlocked gates of the Palais de ...”

“... among French citizens to attest that their bearers had been Voluntary Resistance Fighters. Yet André Malraux, talking to Sanche de Gramont in 1970, asserted that ‘we’ Resistants were 17,000, while ‘they’ – French members of the Waffen SS – were 40,000. That begs a question to which I know no answer, though ...”

“... In the preface to Days of Contempt, André Malraux alerted his readers to the fact that ‘it is the concentration camps that are dealt with here.’ This was in 1935, and the first of Hitler’s concentration camps had been established only two years earlier. But this preface is misleading, for the novel is neither informative nor prophetic about the concentration camps – what it mainly reveals is the conditioning power of the historical imagination ...”

“... forced on you with the tacit smugness of ‘I’ve been there, and you haven’t!’ Theroux’s André Parent, like Theroux himself, opts in his own travel narrative for ‘the effect of people talking ... their exact words. Nothing was more human than direct speech. It could be very simple, the place making it extraordinary.’ This is one option: allow ...”

“... shared arrondissement and their nearness to the Luxembourg Gardens be of particular significance? André Malraux lived in the Rue du Bac – for ever rendered more attractive by the remark made by the exiled Madame de Staël, that it was this street that she missed most of all – whilst Robert Brasillach lived in the more elongated ugliness of the Rue ...”

“... Jewish version of the Catholic François Mauriac, while Lévy had dreamed of being Mitterrand’s André Malraux (unfortunately for him, Régis Debray got there first – just as, Lévy notes in Le Lys et la cendre, he had ‘stolen the part’ of the intellectual as adventurer when he was jailed in Bolivia for joining Che Guevara). More ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this posture, if we can, from simple denial of the facts or a too warm embrace of magical realism. André Malraux said ‘Buenos Aires is like the capital of an empire that never existed,’ and this is true in a sense that takes us well beyond the way the city looks, with its banks and monuments, boulevards and grand spaces. Buenos Aires was never a ...”

“... to spring out of nowhere. ‘Nothing like this has been done since the great Gothic cathedrals!’ André Malraux supposedly said. The pace of construction was so rapid that many of these buildings, known as ‘grands ensembles’, were designed only as drawings, not as models. ‘It was often the bird’s-eye view that supplied the architects with the ...”

“... painter of themes. Themes, not subjects or ‘subject matter’: he pointed out the difference to André Malraux in 1937, just before Guernica left his studio for the Paris World’s Fair. Malraux had remarked that though neither of them put much stock in ‘subject matter’, on this occasion, in painting the great ...”

“... was able to read similar accounts of the dignity and humanity of those who fought against Franco. André Malraux, in his novel l’Espoir, told how one of the planes in his squadron was brought down in the mountains, behind the Loyalist lines. There were no roads, only mule paths, and the entire population escorted the stretcher-bearers as they brought ...”

“... And ‘there was that business of triggering energies,’ Johns said. At worst, there is André Malraux saying to Clara Malraux: ‘Better to be my wife than a second-rate writer.’ The talented Clara Malraux did cling onto him as sole ‘significant other’ long after ...”