“... wore a neat bow-tie and who despatched some thirty bodies from his cosy den in the Rue Le Sueur. Pierre Loutrel, known as Pierrot le Fou, who was liable to shoot at anybody and who eventually shot himself. These were the stars who strutted on the boulevards of crime. But, perhaps more typical of France are the mysterious, enclosed, claustrophobic crimes ...”

“... of Foucault comes from 1958, when he was in Hamburg as French cultural attaché. The novelist Pierre Gascar, who had come to give a lecture, found himself greeted at the station by Foucault – nursing at chin level, like a condemned man tied to the stake, a placard bearing the words ‘Institut Français’. Foucault introduced himself and, Gascar ...”

“... Debré, an Aids researcher and professor, fittingly at the Institut Pasteur; a concise life by Pierre Darmon, a historian of medicine; and a detailed examination, based on laboratory notebooks, of certain aspects of Pasteur’s research, by Gerald Geison, who is a historian of science at Princeton. Debré’s study is now the best one-volume introduction ...”

“... social revolution...peaceful and silent’ – as the great architect of French social security, Pierre La Rocque, described it in 1955. True, the Washington Post’s Bernard Nossiter, writing as recently as 1978, spoke of Britain: A Future that Works, advancing the argument that having wisely preferred a leisurely pace and a high quality of life to the ...”

“... CERES, the far left of the Party, we sometimes hear the hollow tones of crypto-Stalinism. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, head of CERES and currently Minister of Research, has twice made fairly questionable statements appeasing the USSR over Afghanistan and Poland. The important fact, however, is that there now exists an immense Socialist pool in which the ...”

“... scribes, the cultural commodity brokers? That Abel Ferrara or Wim Wenders or Fassbinder or Jean-Pierre Melville would recognise that they were the only ones who understood the secret text, the story beneath the story. And they would be whisked away, club class, to an air-conditioned suite to collaborate on some long-incubated millennial masterpiece. They ...”

“... took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these aged artists and the portrait camera is quite a different one. Both elderly painters are closely buttoned up, Rouault formally with waistcoat, wing-collar, cravat and Homburg, his tired ...”

“... be bothered with. She often did it when I took her out to meet my friends.So I’d been reading Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, and was telling Deborah about the diagram that shows how taste in interior decoration correlates with social class. ‘Not for me!’ she spat furiously, through her M&S prawn sandwich (it was always prawn for Deborah, from the ...”

“... unrepresentable trauma of the middle passage. By the time the Diligent reached the harbour of St Pierre on Martinique, nine slaves had died – a relatively low mortality rate for the time. The survivors were bathed, shaved and their skin rubbed with palm oil. Dealers boarded the ship to inspect the human merchandise. The captain named his price – 950 ...”

“... His hostility towards his father supplies the propellant for his curious second novel, Gueule de pierre, which stands out among his fiction for the wrong reasons, as appearing to have engaged him emotionally to the point where it loses its balance. It has excellent moments, notably at the start, with its hero’s anxious reflections in an aquarium on the ...”

“... exile – lay the whole mess of contradictions that was the life and reign of Alexander I. Marie-Pierre Rey acknowledges the tsar’s contradictions, but manages to extract from them a remarkably coherent image of a principled man who embraced constitutionalism when it still smelled of the guillotine, who gave constitutions to Finland, Poland and France, and ...”

“... the help of Arab and Western support. Yet the war was brought to an end, and what clinched it, Pierre Razoux argues in his new history of the conflict, was the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This made possible a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow, which the Soviets were eager to achieve, afraid that a defeat for Iran would permit the US ...”

“... much of 1949 in Paris, where he met Alice B. Toklas, Olivier Messiaen, Alberto Giacometti and Pierre Boulez, whose recently completed Piano Sonata No. 2 and ensemble work Polyphonie X were considered de rigueur Modernism. When he returned to New York the pair began a correspondence – anthologised in unabridged form as The Boulez-Cage Correspondence ...”

“... Pressed to improve the ratings of the network at which he is the only black staff writer, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) comes up with the idea of reviving blackface minstrelsy. Although he imagines that the racist stereotypes of shuffling, lazy, nonsense-talking Negroes will discredit the form, his white boss, his white writers, and his black and ...”

“... encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’ was already talismanic, and Pierre Reverdy, who turned this line into a directive that images be born from ‘a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’. Abrupt encounters – between texts, pictures, things, places and people – became the staple of Surrealist ...”