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“... church, made a symbol of la France profonde, as invoked in the poetry of Balthus’s friend Pierre-Jean Jouve.As France surrendered to Germany, Balthus (of Polish extraction, born a German citizen, frequently a Swiss resident, but when he died a French national) began to associate his art with Cézanne, by then generally agreed to be the most French and the ...”

“... the pipe between his lips, a beam of light striking the mystic smoke and wrinkled brow together. Jean Genet’s ringless hand is pudgy and partially bandaged as it waits to take the cigar from his lips, Parisian streets humming behind his leatherclad bulk (1963). Balthus in 1990 holds a porcelain coffee-cup near his quizzical face as he regards us with his ...”

“... The weightless characters who track about in Jean Echenoz’s novels are granted a sense now and again that that’s where they are, in someone else’s story, fulfilling burlesque routines not of their own devising. They’re not great thinkers, merely see-through functionaries of the plot. There’s a droll exchange marking one of these twinges of self-awareness in an early novel called Cherokee – named for the Forties song, not for the Native Americans as such – between the driver of a Deux-Chevaux and his captive passenger: ‘ “We could take you somewhere ...”

“... and Bataille (an odd alignment, all things considered); Pierre de Boisdeffre placed him with Jean Giono, Céline and Queneau. This will doubtless come as some surprise to those for whom Simenon means only the Maigret novels. In fact, of the 192 novels he published under his own name, 75 were romans policiers and the other 117 what he called ‘romans ...”

“... regular patterns of change such that its future state can be predicted, while others – such as Jean-André Deluc, who first introduced the term ‘geology’ – believed the Earth’s past and future were as unpredictable as human history. By this time, there was growing recognition that almost all of the Earth’s history occurred before humans came ...”

“... for raw liquor sprayed with vermouth, at Elaine’s Restaurant, or perhaps it’s the home of Jean Stein, the wealthy and stunningly attractive daughter of the chairman of the board of the Music Corporation of America. Money and beauty, as ever, are important, but power and greed have yet to replace ideas and aspirations in the popular currency. It would ...”

“... and finally she has some sessions of Freudian psychotherapy with the wise Dr Bell (played by Jean Anderson). There was a real female Freudian analyst working at Netherne at the time, whose name was Dr Yates. Her film alter ego helps Jane diagnose the cause of her breakdown as an inadequate childhood relationship with her mother, which she now projects ...”

“... for the Ingrams psyche. We know little of his father. According to Lynn Barber, Leonard St Clair Ingrams was ‘a freelance banker’ whose doings are ‘shrouded in exotic mystery’. Leonard may or may not have been a great athlete, a fascist and a spy – ‘I don’t know if he was pro-German or pretending to be pro-German,’ Ingrams says. He may ...”

“... sweep of artistic and political friendships, from Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt to Gide and Valéry to Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. His politics were socialist and Dreyfusard; he also moved in the circle around the Revue blanche. The first three editions of Histoires naturelles were illustrated by Félix Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard; Vallotton also ...”

“... et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture), written with Jean-Claude Passeron, was published in 1964. It was here he first tried out his argument that educational inequality has cultural as much as economic causes; that the French education system bolsters rather than alleviates disparities; that we are bound by our ...”

“... that could clip a hedge’, she made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford her ‘bête noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the Town’, the ...”