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“... still be the case that good looks are a currency which can be put to good use or to bad. Take Liane dePougy, ‘celebrated cascadeuse of the Belle Epoque’, as Anita Brookner has described her. She was, for most of her life, one of the most beautiful and elegant women in France, had a triumphant career as a ...”

“... faces, clothes and attitudes of the main players – like those dreary Art Deco canvases of Tamara de Lempicka now reproduced everywhere on postcards and Taschen calendars – have become all too familiar. Romaine Brooks’s hideous painting of Una Troubridge (with pet dachshunds) in male drag and monocle? Take it away, Madame, tout ...”

“... idea that books could be composed in motion, and made the more moving for it. We met in the Rue de Sèvres, in the Rue du Bac, in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Our feet took us to the same Vietnamese restaurant, to the same cafés, and, at different moments, to the same television studios where he held forth before the cameras in a way that would have put ...”

“... Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were queer women. ‘Miss Barney’s circle was not ...”

“... quite suitable to her carefully tended personal image, so akin to those of Lola Montez and Liane dePougy, or those of Garbo and Callas. Madsen’s book takes note of the variability of Chanel’s own accounts of events, and gives several if no single one can be authenticated. He clearly knows French well, but ...”

“... say She Was Doing the Best She Could. 2. The First Rakish Lover-Patron. The dapper Prince Henri de Ligne, moustachioed Belgian man of the world and ‘fantastic swell’, who set Sarah on her way in the more Nana-like circles of Parisian high society. He seems to have picked her up in the Tuileries Gardens one day. Bernhardt always had at the ready a more ...”