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“... writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at Clinton’s National Security ...”

“... Fortes and Edmund Leach at Cambridge. He acquired the idea of a historical anthropology from Jean-Pierre Vernant in Paris. Twenty years ago he took up ancient Chinese science. He has since become the world’s foremost contributor to studies comparing aspects of ancient Greek and Chinese civilisations. In a series of half a dozen books he has described ...”

“... de mémoire’) – and his book is a model of recent French historiography, in the tradition of Pierre Nora and Maurice Agulhon. He is also a political scientist, intrigued by the general’s stake in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of ...”

“... his students’ most radical ideas. ‘His personality resembles some great baroque building,’ Pierre Boulez wrote. ‘Beneath the very real complexities of his intellectual world he has remained simple and capable of wonder – and that alone is enough to win our hearts.’There was little room for doubt in Messiaen’s spiritual convictions, and his ...”

“... A, Walden Pond) may reconcile writers and readers to the United States or, as in Melville’s Pierre, turn back on the interpreter in a nightmare of self-referentiality that cuts words off entirely from the world. But Pierre’s negative exception proves the positive-thinking rule: no salvation outside the United ...”

“... see than expected. French Revolution rooms specially impressive. The tricolor that surely inspired Pierre-Jean Jouve’s poem, A une soie: ‘Propice et large soie étalée sans un pli ... Et suave de trois cruautés arrondies.’ – ‘Et le drapeau disait: Liberté ou la Mort’ (end of eighth strophe). In fact the flag says ‘Vivre libre ou mourir’, but ...”

“... evangelical truth’. The philosophy of Christ had no rival for him. But a mere four years later Pierre Toussaint was lamenting that new pastor was just old priest, writ large. Both seem to have been right. What went on in the universities interests scholars as seldom before. Masters of the Reformation appears at a good time. Oberman is a generous ...”

“... with famous intellectuals, lunching them at Delmonico’s, Elaine’s, the Four Seasons and the Pierre. He liked popular scientists (Steven Pinker says he barely knew him) and had the billionaire’s love of a Nobel laureate. It turns out that a few semesters spent in one’s youth at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences can do wonders for a ...”

“... virtues of integrity and solidarity. The quintessential example of the resistance genre is Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel. In the film we’re not just told that all the characters will die, that they are already ‘shades’ (ombre meaning both ‘shadow’ and ‘ghost’ or ‘shade’); we’re shown ...”

“... of detective fiction – and not unheard of in real life. In Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? (1998), Pierre Bayard proposed an alternative solution to Agatha Christie’s most notoriously ingenious plot, which fits the evidence better than Hercule Poirot’s (making, in the process, a larger point about the ways in which texts are co-constructed by writers and ...”

“... it possible to identify enigmatic upheavals of shard-like planes as ‘suit coat’ or ‘face’. Pierre Daix, a prominent Picasso scholar, lends credence to this idea when he reports Picasso’s aversion to abstraction and his insistence on using ‘a few small signs, like the eyes, that make the things spill over into a non-abstract universe’. For the ...”

“... I once began an essay on conceptions of woman in Surrealist art with Breton’s response to Pierre Unik’s query about what women liked, which was something to the effect that it was extraordinary even to consider the question. How could any sane, unbourgeois, rebellious critic possibly remain devoted to such an exaggeratedly macho movement? From a ...”

“... was not accompanied by a will to impose language. In De recuperatione Terre Sancte (1305-7), Pierre Dubois argued that Christians repopulating the Holy Land would have to learn local vernaculars if they were to thrive. The Franciscans (concerned with converting Muslims), and the Dominicans (who aimed to reunify the Western Church with the Greek Church ...”

“... than 2.5 billion people around the world with dental cavities.Schutt credits the French surgeon Pierre Fauchard with recognising the dangers of sugar consumption. Fauchard, an early advocate of fillings, blamed the formation of dental cavities on acids from sugary food. He was born in 1678, five years before the first observation of oral bacteria by Antonie ...”

“... patient – the Roussel money talking, no doubt – of the top man in Paris for mind disorders, Pierre Janet, and crops up under a pseudonym as a case-study in Janet’s book, From Anguish to Ecstasy. ‘A shy, scrupulous, neuropathic young man, easily depressed’, Janet sums up his patient, whom he couldn’t cure. La Doublure, the poem Roussel was ...”