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“... For twenty years or so – but particularly after she hit the jackpot with her Goncourt Prize and sold a million copies of her most conventional novel, The Lover (1984) – Marguerite Duras was a literary monster. Her personality and the legends about her have fascinated readers of everything from Elle to the Village Voice. Laure Adler’s biography, the best so far, proves that the required period of mourning is over ...”

“... In 1954 I was stationed near Versailles, doing my national service with the 93rd Infantry Regiment. I had been called up for 12 months, but like many young Frenchmen of that unlucky generation, I was kept in the Army nearly two and a half years owing to unforeseen ‘events’ in North Africa. We weren’t old enough to have joined either the Free French in Britain or the Resistance against the Nazis in France ...”

“... truth. Curiously enough, it is not Anne Whitmarsh who rescues her from these charges so much as Olivier Todd, whose severe yet affectionate memoir, Un Fils Rebelle, describes his relations with Sartre without proposing any assessment of either Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. Todd, who did not discover his own ...”

“... to be on speaking terms with Camus because of his ‘reactionary’ tendencies. The irony, as Olivier Todd points out, was that Camus had joined the Communist Party in 1935 because he felt it was a way of looking after the interests of his mother, an illiterate cleaning woman, and his uncle Etienne, a barrel-maker – his father, whom he’d never ...”

“... over so many years to take him at his own valuation, even though that was patently way too high. Olivier Todd has written a Life dense with facts and hard-headed almost to excess when it comes to exposing just how weirdly far Malraux could go in dressing up his own achievements. This is biography as mythicide, and mightily readable at that. We all know ...”

“... in the books’ sales, given that most child readers are dependent on adult purchasing power. As Olivier Todd once said, parents read Tintin after their children: they read Astérix before the children can get their hands on the books.Another crucial factor must be the history that Astérix both recalls and satirises. Just as 1066 and All That depends ...”

“... economism, and then (after 2001) by the storm-blast of a wounded American nationalism. Both Todd and Soros try to focus on more profound trends, and give different philosophical and anthropological explanations of what globalisation may really be about. Soros is a hero of the capitalist world, known especially in the 1990s for his activity in Central ...”

“... vehement. ‘I cannot name one person, left, right, or centre,’ said the reporter and novelist Olivier Todd, ‘who was not really fascinated by the man,’ As if in confirmation, the Paris bookshops last December were displaying a crisp new volume in the austere Gallimard uniform, bearing a red publicity band with the single name MALRAUX in white ...”

“... plagued by thoughts of suicide, experienced unsettling premonitions; according to his biographer Olivier Todd, he felt that ‘evil was floating in the air.’An aura of disquiet, both political and psychological, runs through the South America diaries. But so does a sense of engagement and connection. They’re more personal, richer in detail and ...”

“... that gangrene was infectious stopped her doing so. But she does not hesitate to point out that Olivier Todd, who has written of his intimate relations with Sartre whilst roundly condemning Sartre’s influence, was never on such close terms with Sartre as he claimed. She says the same about Paul Victor, Sartre’s last collaborator, with whom he was ...”

“... disgusting physical detail’. Deceptions were frequent despite their pact. According to Olivier Todd, Sartre readily admitted that he coped with his many women by lying to them. ‘ “You lie to them all?” inquired Todd. “To them all,” replied Sartre with a smile. “Even to Castor?” “Especially to ...”

“... in 1995. Growing inequality is one of the central preoccupations in Who is Charlie?, Emmanuel Todd’s short, polemical book about what is and isn’t ‘equal’ about France, which parts of the country are historically disposed to egalitarian values while others aren’t, and how the trinity of liberty, equality, fraternity came to crumble in the middle ...”

“... or defending’.This article draws on three valuable sources in English: Albert Camus: A Life by Olivier Todd, translated by Benjamin Ivry (Chatto 1997), Camus & Sartre: the Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended it by Ronald Aronson (Chicago, 2004), and Algeria: France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans (Oxford, 2011), a formidable successor ...”

“... including those quoted in Fleeing Hitler, caught the atmosphere well. But a short passage in Olivier Todd’s autobiography, Carte d’identités (2005), provides one of the best portraits of a mother and child taking to the road as the summer heat wave built. Todd’s mother had moved them from Paris to ...”

“... as a whole had triumphed against the Nazis and its puppet government in Vichy. The reality, as Olivier Wieviorka shows in this magisterial book, ably translated by Jane Marie Todd, was rather different. De Gaulle had not in fact called on the entire French population to rise up in 1940, but had tried to persuade officers ...”