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“... Marguerite Yourcenar was a highly honoured French writer, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, but her mother came from the Low Countries. The mother died in 1903, eight days after the daughter’s birth: her married name was Fernande de Crayencour (from which the pen name ‘Yourcenar’ was constructed) and her maiden name was de Cartier de Marchienne ...”

“... Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Thus when she was proposed for membership of the French Academy, it was natural that some Frenchmen would make an issue of her nationality, in order to prevent a woman joining their club ...”

“... of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural.’ Not so in Marguerite Yourcenar’s world. She is renowned for her timeless narrative gift and lucid style, and she regards her books as defining that unfashionable thing, an ‘ideal of humanity’. Yet death occurs in these fictions with what Ruskin would have seen ...”

“... Jean-Louis Barrault’s company performing Mishima’s Modern Noh Plays, beautifully translated by Marguerite Yourcenar and directed with iconoclastic verve by Maurice Béjart. I could not be better pleased. What fun for Mishima, watching all this fuss from somewhere in his reincarnation. The last time I saw him, eight months before his death, he ...”

“... in one’s own way. But something has already been gained if we use only the original stones. Marguerite Yourcenar The problem that everyone faces in writing about the Dome of the Rock is that so few ‘stones’ remain from the first century of Islam. Why was it built then; what did it mean to the Muslims who built it? We know so little, and so much ...”

“... of appeal for the armchair traveller – more sinister, more rocky-horror. A Coin in Nine Hands is Marguerite Yourcenar’s expansion, written in the Fifties, of her Denier du Rêve, first published in 1934. She writes in her afterword: ‘One of the reasons that Denier du Rêve seemed worthy to be published again is that, in its day, it was one of the ...”

“... Marguerite Duras describes a crowd in French Indo-China (in 1930): ‘The clatter of wooden clogs is ear-splitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign.’ This impression is familiar to me, from National Service days in Hong Kong and the British New Territories ...”

“... passed to a favourite student, Françoise Héritier, but in 1980 he voted against the election of Marguerite Yourcenar as the first woman member of the Académie on the grounds that an institution which had excluded women for three centuries should not precipitately alter its ways. A young anthropologist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure recently told me ...”

“... I most adore glimmering in them’. Nine days later, Forster, stimulated this time by a reading of Marguerite Yourcenar’s excellent Présentation Critique de Constantin Cavafy, writes to George Savidis, a Greek friend and editor of Cavafy: ‘and she does bring out, though without stating it, his triumph – a triumph that has nothing to do with ...”

“... to draw our skirts away.’ While she admired certain female writers – H.D., Sylvia Plath and Marguerite Yourcenar, the author of Memoirs of Hadrian, among them – and was alive to the social restrictions imposed on women, she had no time for the ‘bellyaching’, self-pity and ‘defensive stridency’ of the feminist movement.For women ...”

“... best things in the book. Among those who count as friends, rather than passing acquaintances, are Marguerite Yourcenar, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola (among several interesting photographs is one of Richie beside a gawky, 19-year-old Sofia Coppola, who looks thoroughly lost). He knew Ozu and Kurosawa, and wrote books about ...”

“... unexpected death of an aunt of whom he was fond, Mack wanders off through Philip Larkin, Hamlet, Marguerite Yourcenar and Robert Frost. Yet the best he can come up with is the thought that Gray wrote his poem ‘to bring some sense of meaning to recent events’. Much of Mack’s book is similarly padded with the inessential. A particularly bizarre and ...”

“... cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. Her children had children; she had other relationships, and sometimes the men moved into the house in Cergy, which she kept in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy.I’ve pieced ...”

“... haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and both Martina Navratilova and k.d. lang ...”

“... Change unnerved him, whether it was the nomination of the first woman to the Académie française (Marguerite Yourcenar), or the emergence of more radical forms of anthropology that examined the discipline’s complicity with empire, or questioned the anthropologist’s authority. Faced with a future he found unappetising, he turned further ...”