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“... old-fashioned American scholars and the French poets, and between flattering Frenchmen (like André Maurois) and the bluff English. I revere Nikolaus Pevsner, but he will have to forgive me if I detect a touch of flirtatiousness in The Englishness of Art. One could labour the point, and offer reasons why no such concept could be valid, but I hardly ...”

“... and grumbling to the last. Her funeral attracted an interesting range of mourners, including André Maurois and Paul Valéry, the former socialist Dreyfusard Alexandre Millerand, the Duchesse d’Uzès,Marshal Lyautey – and of course a Calmann Lévy. Old age and the watershed of the First World War had calmed the old antagonisms, if only by ...”

“... Yeats, Hardy, Frost and Stevens. The image of Shelley as angel, by the way, is Arnold’s, but André Maurois’s version of it – ‘Shelley angelic, too angelic’ – in his Ariel (1923) sent it aloft again and has done much to keep it there. Many readers have derived from it their definitive image not only of Shelley but of the life of a ...”

“... and after that went into publishing, but he remained a distinguished Proustian. Invited by André Maurois to look at the Proust archive, at that point still held by Proust’s niece, de Fallois discovered Jean Santeuil, a long unfinished autobiographical novel, and brought out an edition in 1952. He also found a collection of essays that could be ...”

“... It is an old-fashionedly belle-lettristic sort of book, in the tradition of Lytton Strachey and André Maurois. There is a concession to modern times in having a chapter on women, but Rupert Christiansen is pretty much unreconstructed. Mary Wollstonecraft gets taken to task for ‘deficiencies of method, arrangement and style’ (‘but it is difficult ...”

“... disguised autobiography, as the ‘convincing and accessible near-novels by biographers like André Maurois and George Painter’ suggest, and it reaches out to a universe far more varied than ‘the thin thread of Proust’s biography’. These are fighting words in our biographical days, but the reminder is more than timely. What we miss if we ...”

“... sort of intellectual. Does he not read? In prison after the Moncada attack he read A.J. Cronin, André Maurois and Romain Rolland, the old Latin American radical bible Les Misérables, The 19th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Axel Munthe – ‘a book that made a significant impression’ – Vanity Fair, A Nest of Gentlefolk, Somerset ...”

“... was both old-fashioned and very deaf – had already refused access to several people, including André Maurois, to the papers of ‘poor dear aunt Teresa’. I don’t remember how I persuaded him to change his mind, since it is very difficult to be persuasive or reassuring at the top of one’s voice, but I suspect that he did so not because of ...”

“... the French equivalent of a stiff upper lip: ‘If you are not a Roman, be worthy of being one.’ André Maurois cites the fragment as autobiographical, noting that it is unpublished. Painter dramatises the moment: Mme Proust stammers her quotation, Marcel interjects that he can’t bear to be without her. Roger Duchêne coolly insists that this is just ...”

“... had published just one novel: were he to stop writing he would be forgotten. Another novelist, André Fraigneau, was more high flown. To continue to write and publish was a duty, he declared, because it would prove that French civilisation still existed. Such sentiments were echoed by the Vichy authorities. Alfred Fabre-Luce is quoted as reporting that the ...”