“... modest and not, as they usually are, possessive. The most modest of all Borges’s storytellers is Pierre Menard, ‘the author of Don Quijote’, who after great labours produces two and a bit chapters of a text which already exists. Not the same text at all, urges Borges, because Menard’s verbatim feat was achieved nearly three centuries after Cervantes ...”

“... put together by him and his friend Gérard Brach, equally underset and insatiable. The financier Pierre Braunberger, who failed to see that he was billed as the real Prince Charming in this revolting allegory, was happy with everything except the midgets, who proved too expensive. On their account, he withdrew his money and the film collapsed before a frame ...”

“... torn from spools. It will never stop. The strapping of ears and limbs.’ Slowly the talk builds. Pierre Berbizier, the scrum-half, tells the players: ‘Breathe out, get your wind. Find your balance; now shift your balance.’ Jacques Fouroux, coach and former captain (a.k.a. ‘le petit caporal’), urges the forwards and half-backs to inspire ‘confidence ...”

“... Prize winner, escaped.) It was years before Le Corbusier’s architectural partner, his nephew Pierre Jeanneret, would return to work at the office at 35 rue de Sèvres, so horrified was he by his uncle’s complicity with the Vichy regime. But with his customary precision, Le Corbusier pressed on. By 1945, when he was planning l’Unité d’Habitation in ...”

“... in 1790 confirmed their status as the enemy within. One refractory priest at Troyes, François-Pierre Juliot, complained in 1790 that his parishioners had commandeered the high altar as a dining table and urinated in the choir and the sanctuary in protest at his non-compliance with the oath. Such carnivalesque blasphemies prefigured the ritualised ...”

“... rotated and repurposed body parts in surprising and anachronistic configurations. The left hand of Pierre de Wissant, from The Burghers of Calais, creeps from the side of Camille Claudel’s scarred and spattered head. Scale is blown wildly out of joint, as miniature figures cower beneath colossal body parts, articulated in ways that make no sense. In some ...”

“... Paris, they appeared at various times on the churches of Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Eustache and Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, as well as on the Louvre. In 1800, 61 artists signed a petition protesting against its presence there: it had led to the closure of a much loved restaurant beneath it. But it remained in place for a remarkably long time, from the immediate ...”

“... like so many questions this film asks or implies. He is called Alphonse (played by Jean-Pierre Kerien), he is visiting an old flame in Boulogne. He has (just in case) brought his niece Françoise with him, although she is not his niece, she is his current mistress. He says he has spent the last 15 years in Algiers, running a restaurant, and he ...”

“... name and opening the door wide to the debunking analysis of intellectual opportunism pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu – and exemplified here in a particularly satisfying way by Niilo Kauppi’s book. Like the cycles of the great Mafiosi or the history of the Comintern, the chanson de geste of the various avant gardes has a relatively immutable pattern: the ...”

“... he developed and adopted such singular procedures. He directs our attention to the psychologist Pierre Janet’s account in De l’angoisse à l’extase of a nervous crisis the young author suffered when still in his teens for which Janet treated him, but offers nothing himself on the relationship between his life and work, beyond the ‘curious ...”

“... called Rougon who, being a peasant, is coarse and motivated by base urges. They have a son, Pierre. Later, she takes a lover, a vagrant and criminal called Macquart, with whom she has two children, Antoine and Ursule. The birth of these children allows Zola to begin his experiment in the effects of heredity.Of ...”

“... But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.’ Thus the good Sir Thomas Browne, meditating on urns, and on mankind’s dealings with the last mystery. Sumerian Gilgamesh journeyed to the Garden of the Sun at the world’s end to find the herb of eternal youth; but when he bent to drink at a fountain, a serpent stole it, proving its power by shedding his old skin ...”

“... and legs to look right. ‘Portrait of Henri Michel-Lévy’ by Degas (c.1878). François-Pierre Guillois’s articulated wooden skeleton from around 1800 is another weird, robotic-looking creature, made of wood, metal and string. It is anatomically quite precise and can assume the positions of a living body; its forearms are two wooden bones that ...”

“... of the movie when Marcello, after the fall of Mussolini, meets up again with the man, played by Pierre Clémenti, his long dark locks now replaced by a sweep of thin blond hair that makes him look like Andy Warhol. Marcello, frantic with surprise and outrage at the chauffeur’s continuing existence, accuses him of having assassinated the professor in ...”

“... Luigi Albertini. Next, at 131 and 116 respectively, are the French and German historians Pierre Renouvin and Fritz Fischer. The American historian of international relations Paul W. Schroeder would be 97 and his British colleague Keith Wilson 80. The youngest, at 64, and the only one still alive, is me. Anderson states in the introduction that he ...”