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“... An eagle once swooped down to catch A rabbit, who made off with due dispatch Towards his lair. It wasn’t near, And he despaired of getting there In time, when going past a beetle’s hole, He thought: ‘Why not?’ And in he shot. Don’t ask me how a beetle’s hole Could possibly accommodate a rabbit. It couldn’t; and the eagle, landing there, could grab it And extract it by the tail ...”

“... La Fontaine’s permanent place in the schoolroom has made him the most widely read of all French writers. Children take his menagerie of talking flora and fauna in their stride. Grown-ups, however, worry about his howlers (grasshoppers don’t eat worms) and mutter about the ambiguity of his moral lessons. Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers ...”

“... bag containing 13 books (the usual suspects plus Ernst Jünger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jean Paul) across the battlefields. When he was finally captured and sent to a temporary camp in France, his first punishment was having to hear the loudspeakers around the fence blasting out Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ fortissimo for nine days and nights ...”

“... like Audrey Tautou, the latest face of Chanel No. 5, who also plays the young Coco Chanel in Anne Fontaine’s Coco before Chanel. So far as one can tell, Chanel was never fully contented (she boasted that she did not require ‘that daily dose of poison, recently invented, that we call happiness’ and her restless scissors were always ...”

“... while her money allowed him to become the largest shareholder in the cultural monthly Mercure de France when it was founded in 1889. His most famous work remains Poil de carotte (1894), the recognisably autobiographical tale of a red-headed boy growing up in a village much like his own. Its continuing power comes from ...”

“... stories offer introspection and revelation – but rarely together. In an essay (on Jean Rhys), she quotes La Fontaine: ‘Misfortune is a kind of innocence.’ And the obverse, too, one could say: innocence is a kind of misfortune. In an unusually abstract passage, she writes: ‘Knowledge ought to arise ...”

“... unattached but lonely John find himself forced into the complex identity of his alter ego, Count Jean de Gué, but his physical resemblance to de Gué’s mother and daughter bestows a past and a future on him, drawing him into the human chain. Taken to extremes, such permeability leads to the parasitical ...”

“... two painters had their first joint show – a posthumous one – only last summer, at the Musée de Lodève. It proved a display of unintentional cruelty. The most compelling Fauve paintings were all by Braque; but while this was just a stage in his development (though a fondly remembered one – fifty years later he bought back his own The Little Bay at La ...”

“... with modern ideas of luxury and comfort than those decorated in any other historical style. De Troy’s famous painting, The Reading from Molière illustrated on the dust-jacket of Katie Scott’s study of the rococo interior, seems to epitomise an ideal of polite but informal and mixed society which is still current. However, those who feel at ease ...”