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“... Dr Destouches published before his prodigious debut in fiction one year later, as Louis Ferdinand Céline, the author of Voyage au bout de la nuit. There were foretastes of Céline in the truculent medical journalism and puffery of Destouches, but nothing to compare with the epochal vituperation with which the Voyage is ...”

“... Céline​ was not a great admirer of Proust. He called him a ‘half-ghost’, far too preoccupied with the doings of an even ghostlier French aristocracy. For this and many other reasons it’s hard to imagine Céline enjoying the thought of their sharing a sudden posthumous literary limelight ...”

“... In 1954 Louis-Ferdinand Céline was still a pariah in France: a collaborator during the Occupation (it had ended only a decade earlier), a notorious anti-semite (his bloodthirsty ‘pamphlets’ dated from as recently as 1941), and in the view of many Frenchmen, the undeserving beneficiary of a 1951 amnesty that allowed him to return to France from Denmark, where he had taken refuge – and served over a year in prison – after the war ...”

“... often inconsistently and with some gossip-column fatuity such as ‘the brilliant but cantankerous ...”

“... wars, firestorms and bombs on the Underground. That shrapnel splinter in the trepanned skull of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, traumatised and exiled to London, to the labyrinth of Soho. This is from Guignol’s Band:Monster shops … phantasmagoric storehouses, citadels of merchandise, mountains of tanned goatskins enough to stink all the way to ...”