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“... are such things as mean too much to say, But little Julie Manet had a try. To represent the young, Paul Valéry Delivered half a speech and then broke down. He missed his master’s deep simplicity. Then everybody started back to town. Among those present were Rodin, Bonnard, Lautrec, Mirbeau, Vallotton, Maeterlinck And Misia’s eternal slave ...”

“... sequence called ‘On Aesthetics’, which, amongst many other things, takes in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry, of jazz, of moss, of air and of being the youngest of four sisters. In tone, the sequence is something like a cross between Auden’s ‘Academic Graffiti’ and the Private Eye scribbling of E.J. Thribb. Often, the line-breaks are deliberately ...”

“... been present to me for decades but which I have never read. Chief among them until recently was Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.Would it have made a difference to read it earlier? I have always had a taste for not-quite-novels, but I suspect this would always have been too much of a not-quite-a-not-quite-novel for me: a strange, pert, bossy little ...”

“... is left unsure about whether the author has really consulted his source or why. For example, Paul Valéry died in 1945 at the age of 74. He had been elected a member of the Académie Française in 1925 and is primarily renowned as a poet. But Tainter brands him as the ‘noted French social philosopher’, with the suggestion that he was still alive ...”

“... of other tutus in the first impression are subsumed into the foliate green of the backcloth. Paul Valéry wrote in 1935 that Degas’s ‘passion was to reconstruct the body of the female animal as the specialised slave of the dance, the laundry … or the streets’; the woman as ‘specialised slave’ of her repeated movements. For the dancer ...”

“... austere position is one backed up, in a more exalted register, by another of Bayard’s heroes, Paul Valéry, who was notorious for the thinness of his reading and correspondingly celebrated for the breadth and penetration of his thoughts about the practice of literature in general. Bayard is not exactly against reading, even though he tells us that he ...”

“... soldiers had a better view of French troop positions outside Verdun. ‘Do something beautiful,’ Paul Cret, chair of the steering group of the American Battle Monuments Committee, told the architect, John Russell Pope, in 1925: ‘This is the most important monument and for this reason it has been entrusted to you.’ Pope was one of the most successful and ...”

“... transaction with the outside world, regularly intercepting letters. Paranoia was the family ethos. Paul’s sensibility did not earn high marks from his father. Its earliest manifestations were greeted with derision and he relied for emotional support almost entirely on his vivacious mother, Elisabeth. ‘A quiet and docile student, he worked hard; he had a ...”

“... in the nights made sleepless by his failure as an artist’. Manet said he lacked naturalness; Valéry that he made Molière’s Misanthrope look weak and easy. It was, in part, an act. ‘What’s this I hear?’ he said to one hostess. ‘You’ve been going around saying that I’m not wicked, that people have made a mistake concerning me. If you take ...”

“... inwardly seized by a looming work in progress. Sometimes the arrangement is very tight. Here is Paul Valéry (wrongly labelled 1946; he died in 1945) leaning on a mantelpiece. He looks at us full face from the left side of the picture, where his pinstriped shoulder partly hides a vase of flowers, and a flowered dish sits near him. Nearer us, a small ...”

“... Most of us will have had, within the past 24 hours, an inkling of the inner touch. Waking up, as Paul Valéry wrote, is a kind of ‘auto-genesis’: somewhere between stupor and shock, we discover ourselves again. For a moment, like Proust’s narrator, we experience once more, ‘in its original simplicity, the feeling of existence as it may quiver in ...”

“... After his rapid demise, she transferred her admiration to the nationalist poet and agitator Paul Déroulède, her hero during the Dreyfus Affair, during which she had the time of her life, devoting her talents as satirist and cartoonist to the anti-semitic cause. Finally, she gave grudging approval to the radical Clemenceau – ‘A real Frenchman, very ...”

“... Since at one point Humphrey quotes Dryden for support for his theory, I shall go to another poet, Paul Valéry, for another point of view: ‘Credit requires that walls of coffers be opaque, and the interchange of human things between men requires that brains be impenetrable.’ Some students of animal behaviour have indeed argued that deception is ...”

“... At one point he writes: ‘I would have confessed to everything, anything.’ Perhaps this is what Paul Valéry meant when he said ‘qui se confesse ment.’ The ‘anything’ topples over into untruth. Even in confessing to lies he’s lying, using the excuse and genre of the confession to write a memoir, to relive his lies one more time. Mary Karr’s ...”

“... in Anna Shechtman’s words, become ‘the memory-writers of their respective generations’. Paul Valéry, to Ludovic Cortade, seems to have been eavesdropping on conversations in the Cahiers office when he asks (in 1928): ‘What should we be without the help of that which does not exist?’ And we may all be writing along with Godard when he asks ...”