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“... earlier book of conversations, Practicalities, which was translated by Samuel Beckett’s lover, Barbara Bray, who put much of Duras’s work into English. In The Lover, the young French woman in her mother’s silk dress is contemptuous of her lover’s failure to defy his rich father and marry her, though he is the one who will phone years later to ...”

“... in chronological order: it is left to the reader to draw conclusions of a general, public sort. Barbara Bray has put it all into good English, in such a way that we feel we are missing something by not reading it in French. Nor do we have the French experience. The ‘story’ sometimes jumps a long way forward in time, with impressions of the war ...”

“... he imagined, ‘ideal’ for the Third Programme. McWhinnie agreed and passed the material on to Barbara Bray, the producer of All That Fall, who got to work on the translation I’ve just quoted. Beckett was still commending Le Square the following spring as he finished Krapp’s Last Tape, of which he wrote years later: ‘A woman’s tone goes ...”

“... knew what he was at, including flirting with self-parody. His long-time confidante and lover, Barbara Bray, well understood the game by the time she received this jolly missive from Porto Santo near Madeira in 1968: ‘Nothing to tell here. Stopped antibiotics. Steady coldish east wind. Often cloudy. Strand badly polluted. Wonder if this is the right ...”

“... Jean Genet’s flirtation with radical politics began with his discovery – or was it entombment? – by Sartre. It is recorded that when Genet first read Saint Genet, he was cast into deep despair, an emotion shared by many others who have tried to read Sartre’s massive study. But being a practical man he was not one to reject attention. What is extraordinary about Genet’s career is not the extent to which the sage of the Deux Magots left his mark on the subsequent work of this most individual of French writers, but the extent to which Genet managed to struggle free of his mentor ...”

“... growl. The Flaubert-Sand Correspondence has been excellently translated by Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray, and the work divided mimetically between them by gender, with Steegmuller doing Flaubert’s letters and Bray Sand’s. Just about everything that calls for it is footnoted, and there is a running commentary ...”

“... Once upon a time, before the Channel Tunnel was built, there were two contemporary French novelists. Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45, and nobody in England who was not a French specialist had ever heard of him. With Philippe Sollers it was different. Editor of the avant-garde theoretical journal Tel Quel, and associate of literary and psycho-analytic thinkers such as Barthes, Kristeva and Lacan, his was a name of which no self-respecting British intellectual could afford to remain entirely ignorant – though his novels, so far as I can discover, were neither translated nor read ...”

“... These books are the recent work of one of the leading exponents of the ‘new’ history of the French school. The historical achievement of French academics over the last twenty years has set an example to historians in all other countries. French demographers have reopened the whole topic of population change, devising new techniques, asking new questions, and combining accurate measurement with insight into social constraints and mental pathways ...”

“... could be in New York State, or the Carpathians, or in Northern Greece. The place is called Santa Barbara in the French text, Santa Varvara in the English – to make clear, I guess, that while we could be anywhere, we are not in California. The names of places and people are either Latin or Spanish (Vespasian, Alba, Burgos Aguilar), but I’m afraid most of ...”

“... Travel is sometimes supposed to broaden the mind, impending death to concentrate it. Travel is more desirable than impending death, but it is usually harder to arbitrate between the claims of mental breadth and concentration. Reading Off the Rails by Lisa St Aubin de Teran, however, a memoir in which she brings us up to date with her 35-year ‘lifetime of truancy and escape’, a career of spontaneously marrying, travelling and writing, will make many readers feel that the loss of some sorts of breadth is not to be deeply regretted ...”

“... is, inevitably, some talk of Beckett’s extra-marital amours, notably with Pamela Mitchell and Barbara Bray. It is admirably free of the gossipy and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly ...”

“... is not hard to guess what this hard-boiled gathering – Bob Mellish, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Barbara Castle, Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan among them – made of that. Fifteen years later, Benn showed me his father’s election handbill and made the same point – one he must have made to hundreds of others. Where Thatcher rose up the English class ladder ...”

“... for some male readers. The George Eliot entry does not mention her brother Isaac, Charles Bray, Charles Hennell or John Chapman. Lewes gets just eight words (‘a married man unable to divorce his wife’). Sartre similarly gets no more than a dismissive sentence in the de Beauvoir entry. Beauvoir’s book on her mother’s death is cited, but not ...”

“... in helping this veteran of the traditional political class into the Quirinale. An Italian Vicar of Bray, Napolitano had over a long career exhibited one fixed principle, adhesion to whatever world-political trend appeared to be a winner at the time. The incipit of a long sequence came in his student days, when he joined the Gruppo Universitario Fascista, at a ...”