The primary pleasure in 'Making Monte Carlo' comes from watching the various eccentrics, lowlifes, high-rollers, and famous artists -- -- Edvard Munch, Karl Marx, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel -- stroll in to take a seat at the table.

Bachelder’s portrait of middle-class, middle-aged males revolves around football. Full disclosure: In my version of hell, scowling football coaches pace up and down the River Styx, their steady barking of martial commands only interrupted to consult their laminated sheets on which every possible variation on the off-tackle running play is written.

Félix Nadar personifies photography as an avenging angel who, through the accursed image, makes her terrible will known.

Auden, playing the role of “kind but didactic wizard,” would teach Stephen Spender's young son about adjectives or compose “Tolkienish poems” with him.

There’ll always be a place for the sad sack in fiction, heroes of topsy-turvy Bildungsromans who regress or stall rather than develop.

Alexis’s conceit, in which dogs are caught between human and canine worlds, in a sense reflects their real-life predicament: dogs are creatures upon whom owners project distinctly human intelligence and emotions.