“... 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 ...”

“... When Germaine, the only one of Alice’s daughters still living at home, wanted to marry Pierre Sisley (son of Alfred, and therefore a boy Monet had known from birth), Monet and Alice forbade it. Pierre, ‘a painter even less successful than his father’, was regarded by them as little more than a charity ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Christians in 1666, Cotton Mather in 1736, Charles Wesley in 1794, Mother Shipton in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in sight, but doomsday predictions come thick and fast these days. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the election of Donald Trump, the Mayan calendar cataclysm of ...”

“... Dieu de triangulaire’; and this remarkable sentiment is reinforced by the slogan attributed to Pierre Delattre: ‘economise and binarise.’ The simultaneous search for economy and generality of statement has often led modern linguists, wishing to delve below the surface in order to discover underlying rules and patterns, into formulating instructions of ...”

“... stanza della morte, where I caught one glimpse of the flowered beams and fainted fast, and took Pierre Bonnard who delved with me deep in the mysteries of domesticity, year in, year out, leaving me no way back, and took the Tam Lin poet, took the poet of ‘Jellon Grame’, and took my friend ‘Henri de Beaufort’, self-styled, who introduced me first to ...”

“... saints who, MacGregor explains, a young woman of good family could take as models. The theologian Pierre de Bérulle, consoling Henrietta Maria, then on her way to wed Charles I in the desert of Protestant England, offered Mary Magdalene as an example, maintaining that she came from a good family (as did St John before he abandoned society) and was of ...”

“... your lost daughter, even though psychologically you will remain as bereft as you were before. In Pierre Morel’s Taken, starring Liam Neeson, which opened in the UK last autumn but has just appeared in the US, the virtuous man gets to go on a real rampage. Apart from torturing criminals and leaving them to die, our hero shoots a man’s innocent wife in the ...”

“... the Liberal Party’s youthful leader and the son of Canada’s long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau. ‘They know Stephen Harper’s approach is failing them.’ Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), was jubilant: ‘Stephen Harper is the only prime minister in Canadian history who, when asked about the recession during ...”

“... point in the development of painting in Italy and, by implication, in the rest of Europe. As Pierre-Jean Mariette remarked in 1729, in the so-called Recueil Crozat, a lavish collection of reproductions of famous European paintings, this was ‘the time in which, as everyone knows, the fine arts emerged from their tombs’. And in 1745 Antoine-Joseph ...”

“... image – as well as his sustained study of other artists who worked obsessively with line, from Pierre Alechinsky to Jackson Pollock. Haring used his growing celebrity to further political causes that were close to his heart. His work is full of references to the dangers of homophobia, fundamentalism, nuclear power, racism. One of his ...”

“... collectors, and many scholars, including Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Philipp von Stosch and Pierre-Jean Mariette, considered them fundamental to a greater understanding of the ancient world. Through the work of Mariette, the study of gems was closely associated with the history of connoisseurship. The publications on ancient gems by Stosch in 1724 and ...”

“... conjoin with scratchily specific ‘wrinkled faces of peasants and bearded beggars’, as Pierre Curie, one of the curators, puts it. It also includes a tall canvas in which a young woman sits alone by candlelight, eyes fixed on some tiny item her thumbs compress as her nightdress falls loose to reveal her breasts. What does she squeeze? The Servant ...”

“... gymnastics. The fact that Cirque du Soleil gets a tenth of its revenue from merchandise has led Pierre Billot-Boudon, founder of the French avant-garde troupe Archaos, to compare it to McDonald’s; but the formula is copied everywhere. Five years ago, I tore out an article about circus schools in London. A few months later, another article, accompanied by ...”

“... Guy’, as Picabia called himself, did some funny things. He proposed a chess match between Henri-Pierre Roché and himself, the stakes being whose journal, Picabia’s 391 or Roché’s Rongwrong would continue: Picabia won, so 391 went on, while the 34 moves of that fateful game were printed in the single issue of Rongwrong, published in New York. The ...”