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“... front and back flaps – oh! the patented Brooks version of the Giaconda smile, the one that, as Barry Paris says, isn’t so much a ‘come hither’ look as a look that says, to each and every gender: ‘I’ll come to you.’ (If, that is, she likes the look of you – a big if, in fact.) That straightforward look of hers is what makes these ...”

“... however careless and impromptu, into our own sightlines. The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an acute, tender-hearted and entertaining dish of Hepburn facts – he interviewed friends and family, and has a sharp eye for her film-work’s idiosyncrasies; more ...”

“... in the presence of Buñuel, by André Breton in the presence of Eluard. But the words were said by Barry Humphries in the persona of the ruminating convalescent Sandy Stone, and in the Australian context they are not surreal. They are real. Every Australian, even if he lives in Sydney’s Point Piper or Melbourne’s Toorak, has at some time or other found ...”

“... rivalries and regrets. It is prompted by a glimpse through a car window of an apartment in central Paris once occupied by Michèle Morgan (born Simone Renée Roussel), star of Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes, the acme of 1930s poetic realism. The evidence presented comes, with a single exception, from a roll-call of the most celebrated divas of ...”

“... and they are the basis of Personnes, his new installation in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris (until 21 February), which is the third instalment (following Anselm Kiefer in 2007 and Richard Serra in 2008) of the Monumenta series organised by the Ministry of Culture – the Parisian answer to the Unilever series at Tate Modern. In daylight under the ...”

“... impostors of all: women who masqueraded as military men. The tyrannical army surgeon Dr James Barry – prone to picking quarrels and partial to red-heeled, thigh-high boots paired with an outsized dress sword – doesn’t figure in Stoker’s parade. It’s a strange omission – Barry’s story was well known to ...”

“... This isn’t your average farm but a site of adultery, fecklessness, vice. This is a Kevin Barry short story because it could only be a Kevin Barry short story. There Are Little Kingdoms, the collection in which this story appeared, was published in October 2007. Two months later, the model Katy French died from a ...”

“... clutch of novels which extend Irish fiction into the world of Europe. Beckett’s life in wartime Paris is not irrelevant to Molloy, Malone dies and The Unnamable, nor is Stuart’s in wartime Berlin to The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross. Ten years earlier Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien, had written At Swim Two Birds and The Third ...”

“... Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its origins. The first horns sent signals across dark forests; they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch ...”

“... road to the fine arts. Born in 1841, the eldest son of a tailor, his family moved from Limoges to Paris when he was three and he grew up a quintessential urbanite. As an adult, it’s said, ‘he spoke like a working-class labourer with a rasping guttural Parisian accent.’ He was apprenticed in a porcelain painting workshop, where he graduated from doing ...”

“... book, but earlier versions of all nine of its stories have come out in periodicals, including the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along ...”

“... who says: ‘Without me the freaks are just ugly. With me they got romance, they got dash.’ Barry Unsworth spent some time in Sugar and Rum having a laugh at the dash and romance turned out by his protagonist’s creative writing students and examining the writer’s propensity to make ‘meanings’. Early in that novel Benson was rebuked for trying to ...”

“... and moralistic. Twenty years after landing in Egypt, he began publishing his six-volume Paris: ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie (1869-75), a massive, Zolaesque account of the city, teeming with statistics and reportage, opinion and anecdote. In the third volume (1872), his chapter on the guillotine is immediately followed by one on ...”

“... First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look ...”

“... brings Breytenbach within the fold of Walzer’s social critics is that, although he operates from Paris and has taken French citizenship, he continues to address himself to Afrikaners. Suppose he gave up on them and spent his time advocating international intervention to bring down the apartheid regime. He would, plainly, still be a critic of ...”