Agape at agapê? The new first lady of France gave us all a lesson in Greek in her first official interview with L’Express last week:

Ce qui suscite mon admiration, c’est l’agapê des hommes publics, par
exemple Nelson Mandela, leur capacité à s’engager pour les autres.

Pierre Assouline gives us a translation. [FR]

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While we’re stopped at Assouline’s République des Livres, let’s have a chat about Annie Ernaux, Virginia Woolf, and The Years. [FR]

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If Tom Stoppard tells you to burn something, you burn it, even if it’s Nabokov’s secret manuscripts. [Via The Elegant Variation]

What do we think of the issue here at Maîtresse HQ? Eh. We’re not big Nabokov fans so we’ll let everyone else fight it out. At the very least a new Nabokov MS would create busywork for lots of postmodernist scholars, so maybe that’s a reason not to burn it. And we do tend to be conservationists. What’s the worst thing that happens, something Nabokov wanted to keep private goes public? you think Simone de Beauvoir would have wanted her derrière on the cover of Le Nouvel Obs?

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"Books oil the wheels of travel," says Shirley Dent in the Guardian Blogs. Surely they do, Shirley. Nothing gets you through a 12 hour flight from Paris to Tokyo like a stack of books. You know what also helps? Watching DVDs on my laptop.

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One of the books currently oiling my wheels is Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, which I’ll tell you more about later. Here he is talking with Michael Chabon about cultural identity.