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“... the laddish tendency at the Palace de la Rigolade, or Palace of Fun, on a fairground modelled by Queneau on the celebrated Luna-Park in Neuilly, to which it’s good to imagine him, that living A-Z to the city of Paris and its public transport, bussing out, with a view to researching the site rather than wreaking a pile-up on the dodgems. As the setting for ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, around the time that Raymond Queneau was working on his choose-your-own-sonnet sequence, Cent mille milliards de poèmes, and Marc Saporta on Composition No. 1, a looseleaf novel whose pages can be read in any order, Nanni Balestrini produced Tape Mark I, a series of sentence fragments arranged into verse sequences by a computer algorithm ...”

“... and associated verbal business for almost forty years, having been launched by Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau in 1960, and having held monthly meetings designed for the convivial incitement of its members ever since. No sooner was it started than it was understandably co-opted as a ‘sub-committee’ of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, the droll ...”

“... Sonnet 50 (in which Shakespeare grumbles about his horse) becomes: ‘Don’t talk to me about Raymond Queneau,/I’ve had it up to here with French theory./Since Althusser died/I spend my days on eBay.’The delights of eBay have presumably worn off, since Terry in his latest volume follows in the footsteps of ...”

“... the Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, or Oulipo. Founded by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, the group devoted itself to inventing, analysing and sometimes applying constraints for the making of literature. The idea arose in the autumn of 1960 at a colloquium on Queneau’s work at ...”

“... of a work by a young Irish novelist named Sally Mara. Although officially acknowledged by Queneau in the early Sixties, it has never been treated as more than a squib. In a Foreword to this edition Valerie Caton rebuts the idea that Queneau might have written the story for a popular audience with a taste for ...”

“... and older, ludic tradition in French fiction, whose virtuoso among the moderns was the wonderful Raymond Queneau. This tradition, alas, has a habit of going mysteriously lame when it is asked to travel, as if the intellectual comedy at which France can be so good were written exclusively for the natives and disqualified by its triviality elsewhere, for ...”

“... wholly obscured: the father of ’pataphysics, Alfred Jarry, comes and goes in a single sentence, Raymond Queneau is made to sound quite a solemn fellow, Raymond Roussel and Boris Vian are no more than names, and poor Georges Perec, unforgivably, is not even that. This is the saddest omission of all. The New History ...”

“... the idea of the city, or making it do similar psychological work, when she says in a letter to Raymond Queneau that she has ‘been falling in love with Rome … but don’t tell your city this.’ It is striking that in the same letter, dated 1954, she says she shares with Jake Donaghue ‘some nomadic insecurity’, which we might gloss as an ...”

“... reviewer to recognise the brilliance of Flannery O’Connor; he sought an English audience for Raymond Queneau; in 1961, he proclaimed the genius of Harold Pinter. (Pinter has since returned the favour by reading two of Maclaren-Ross’s stories on the radio.) Willetts valiantly charts his endless moves from one grim lodging to another, in ...”

“... on Paris and, more strangely perhaps, Dostoevsky on St Petersburg or, on Le Havre and Paris, Raymond Queneau (whose astonishing ear for demotic language he also admired). Cobb has an ethnographer’s eye for the life of les petits gens, depicting, in a style which just keeps condescension at bay, the quotidian, the banal, the humble and the ...”

“... de Police in Paris. His wife wrote novels with one eye on Hemingway, the other on Fitzgerald. Raymond Queneau advised her to look elsewhere for models. In 1942 she worked for the Book Organisation Office, an institution that sieved manuscripts to make sure they gave no offence to the Germans: she was, in other words, a cog in the censorship ...”

“... Scholar. It was 1956. Ashbery introduced him to the work of the eccentric procedural writer Raymond Roussel, which reignited Mathews’s literary imagination. In 1959 he came into some money and used it to found a little magazine named after one of Roussel’s works, Locus Solus: Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler were collaborators. It ran for ...”

“... The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group’s initiatory text was a sequence of ten sonnets written by Queneau entitled Cent mille milliards de poèmes: these sonnets all use the same rhymes, and are grammatically constructed so that any line in any sonnet can be replaced by the corresponding line in any of the other nine sonnets ...”

“... even vainly – thick volume read with the ease of a novel. Again, the range is imposing – Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Gay’s Art and Act, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse – the casual erudition much in evidence. Updike is a master at summing up careers: from the letters of ...”