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What’s the story?

Audrey Gillan: Trying to find the evidence for mass atrocities in Kosovo, 27 May 1999

... this aspect to which a friend drew my attention when I got home. Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted. ‘History is a combination of reality and lies,’ he said. ‘The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the ...

Man-Eating Philosophers

Will Self: David Cronenberg, 18 June 2015

Consumed 
by David Cronenberg.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £18.99, October 2014, 978 0 00 729915 7
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... of Thomas Penman. However, I’m not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener can’t help assessing the extent to which their style and methodology has been ...

Killing Stripes

Christopher Turner: Suits, 1 June 2017

Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress 
by Anne Hollander.
Bloomsbury, reissue, 158 pp., £19.99, August 2016, 978 1 4742 5065 8
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The Suit: Form, Function and Style 
by Christopher Breward.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £18, May 2016, 978 1 78023 523 3
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... Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred pages of one ...

The ashtrays worry me

Emilie Bickerton: Eric Rohmer, 19 March 2015

Eric Rohmer: Biographie 
by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe.
Stock, 605 pp., €29, January 2014, 978 2 234 07561 0
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Friponnes de porcelaine 
by Eric Rohmer.
Stock, 304 pp., €20, January 2014, 978 2 234 07631 0
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... for his plots. So when the camera started rolling, in Rohmer’s mind chance had become fate. Jean-Louis Trintignant complained about this laissez-aller during the 1968 shoot of what would become Rohmer’s most widely seen film, My Night at Maud’s. The actor said he felt ignored on set, but the director responded: ‘The ashtrays worry me a lot more ...

Grail Trail

C.H. Roberts, 4 March 1982

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
Cape, 445 pp., £8.95, January 1982, 0 224 01735 7
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The Foreigner: A Search for the First-Century Jesus 
by Desmond Stewart.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 241 10686 9
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Satan: The Early Christian Tradition 
by Jeffrey Burton Russell.
Cornell, 258 pp., £14, November 1981, 0 8014 1267 6
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... glance at the list makes the authors’ initial scepticism intelligible enough. The first name is Jean de Gisons (1188-1220), the last Jean Cocteau; those listed are either aristocrats of the House of Lorraine (among whose ancestors are numbered Godfroi de Bouillon, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Merovingian ...

Stay Home, Stay Stoned

Andrea Brady: Diane di Prima, 10 March 2022

Revolutionary Letters: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition 
by Diane di Prima.
City Lights, 213 pp., £13.99, September 2021, 978 0 9957162 6 1
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... di Prima and a group of friends (which included Audre Lorde) discovered the delirious visions of Jean Cocteau. It was a form of ‘magick’, but also a political awakening. ‘We came from a maddened people’, she later wrote, destroyed by greed, depression, ‘by being immigrants in a land of conformity’.Di Prima enrolled at Swarthmore College near ...

The Scene on the Bridge

Lili Owen Rowlands: Françoise Gilot, 19 March 2020

Life with Picasso 
by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake.
NYRB, 384 pp., $17.95, June 2019, 978 1 68137 319 5
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... period, at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ...

Peas in a Matchbox

Jonathan Rée: ‘Being and Nothingness’, 18 April 2019

Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenology and Ontology 
by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Sarah Richmond.
Routledge, 848 pp., £45, June 2019, 978 0 415 52911 2
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... elegance, and it soon had a team of contributors that included Alain-Fournier, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry. Gide then proposed that they branch out into publishing ‘beautiful books’. Neither he nor his colleagues had the means to run a ...

Picasso and the Fall of Europe

T.J. Clark, 2 June 2016

... choses dont je suis le maître mais pas volontairement l’acteur]. The interviewer turned to Jean Cocteau and asked for his impressions. Cocteau’s reply is indicative: he seems to be struggling between the epic and post-epic frames of reference that the new mural put in question, hanging onto the possibility of ...

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... he befriended a thief called Benny Barnett, who taught him to steal cars and introduced him to Jean Lucinda Johnson, a precocious 16-year-old whose ‘skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven’. She would become his first wife. Himes quit college at 17, and began to pack a .44 calibre ...

Spaced

Michael Neve, 3 September 1981

The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey 
by Grevel Lindop.
Dent, 433 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 460 04358 7
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... the congealed juice of the seed-heads of Papaver somniferum, had had many literary advocates. Jean Cocteau called it the ‘least stupid’ thing that he knew of. But in this instance, as so often, literary people are more like everybody else than they sometimes like to think. In the 19th century, opium use was widespread throughout the social ...

Why are you so fat?

Bee Wilson: Coco Chanel, 7 January 2010

Perfumes: The A-Z Guide 
by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.
Profile, 620 pp., £12.99, October 2009, 978 1 84668 127 1
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Chanel: Her Life, Her World, The Woman behind the Legend 
by Edmonde Charles-Roux, translated by Nancy Amphoux.
MacLehose, 428 pp., £14.99, June 2009, 978 1 906694 24 1
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The Allure of Chanel 
by Paul Morand, translated by Euan Cameron.
Pushkin, 181 pp., £12, September 2009, 978 1 901285 98 7
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Coco before Chanel 
directed by Anne Fontaine.
July 2009
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... managed to avoid making even a token appearance among the gilded company – Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and other worthies – on a collaborationist charge. As her perfume once more flew off the shelves, Chanel moved discreetly to Switzerland for a time. She wasn’t even required to sever her relationship with von Dinklage, who ...

Chatwin and the Hippopotamus

Colin Thubron, 22 June 1989

What am I doing here 
by Bruce Chatwin.
Cape, 367 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 0 224 02634 8
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... writes a hard, lucid prose,’ says Chatwin. ‘Paris is full of strange encounters ... He meets Cocteau and Jean Marais, “a plebeian Antinous”, and Cocteau tells how Proust would receive visitors in bed, wearing yellow kid gloves to stop him from biting his nails, and how the dust ...

Yes You, Sweetheart

Terry Castle: A Garland for Colette, 16 March 2000

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette 
by Judith Thurman.
Bloomsbury, 596 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 7475 4309 7
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... Anna de Noailles, Marcel Schwob, Francis Jammes, Renée Vivien, André Gide, Maurice Ravel, Jean Cocteau); a host of gorgeous houses and flats to be described; a small army of doted-on cats and dogs to itemise (Fanchette, Sidi, Kiki-La-Doucette, Saha, Gamelle); and last but not least, the monstrous, labyrinthine, seemingly inexhaustible Colette ...

On the chance that a shepherd boy …

Edmund White: Gide in Love, 10 December 1998

Andre Gide: A Life in the Present 
by Alan Sheridan.
Hamish Hamilton, 708 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 241 12729 7
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Andre Gide ou la vocation du bonheur. Tome 1, 1869-1911 
by Claude Martin.
Fayard, 699 pp., frs 180, September 1998, 2 213 02309 3
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... He was lucky enough to count among his most intimate friends the writer (and Protestant) Jean Schlumberger and the novelist and Nobel Prizewinner Roger Martin du Gard, both of whom were bisexual, though less conspicuously so. They accompanied him on his adventures or exchanged letters with him about his encounters with adolescents, and they almost ...

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