“... 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 ...”

“... microphones which the Elysée might have placed there.) But Foccart kept his secret and even when Pierre Péan brought out his L’Homme de l’ombre in 1990 (subtitled ‘Jacques Foccart: l’homme le plus mystérieux et le plus puissant de la Ve République’), he made no reply – which is why his decision to go public at last is such a coup ...”

“... of the Brazilian Atlantic coast at the time of the European invasion. As an admirer of Méraux, Pierre Clastres, the author of Chronicle of the Guayakí Indians, would have been intimately acquainted with the accounts of cannibalism in the works of Thevet and Léry, as well as in the celebrated account of the German mercenary Hans Staden and in numerous ...”

“... America. In these respects Camembert is a lot more like the McMerde burger than you might suppose. Pierre Boisard seeks to show how, over the past 150 years or so, the cheese has been ruined: industrialised, homogenised, delocalised and, finally, pasteurised – and all without the assistance of American multinational corporations. It’s almost wholly an ...”

“... of the economy as a whole’ without implying any commentary or judgment. In The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of His Business, Jed depicts his melancholy, driven and remote father on the eve of his retirement. Another canvas recalls Jed’s college girlfriend Geneviève, who worked as an escort with cheerful matter-of-factness and ...”

“... however, Georges Remi, aka Hergé, was very certain of his nationality. He was, according to Pierre Assouline, ‘the personification of Belgium’, and it’s true that he created, in Tintin, one of the few national emblems his squabbling country can agree on. Born in 1907 in Etterbeek, outside Brussels, to a Walloon father and a Flemish mother, he ...”

“... were sleeping in their cars’ while most huddled in doorways or curled up on pavements. Pierre Mendès-France, who’d been elected mayor of Louviers five years earlier, remembered the growing numbers of French passing through the Rouen area in imperturbable order of rank. In the first days we saw the sumptuous and fast American cars go by, driven ...”

“... Washington still resemble those of courtiers paying tribute to the throne. Last June, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokesperson, was asked whether Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, would be staying in his post for the moment. Jean-Pierre answered that Biden ‘hasn’t made any decision yet’. The lead ...”

“... international recognition is himself the most resolute opponent of Quebec nationalism. Of course, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was nothing if not cosmopolitan, an elegant figure as effortlessly witty in English as in French. But his education was Francophone: he attended not McGill but l’Université de Montréal. As a student during World War Two, Trudeau resisted ...”

“... and sumptuous lifestyles of the aid barons, and I am sure that the recent resignation of Jean-Pierre Hocke as UN High Commissioner for Refugees – over a scandal involving a fund for first-class airfares – came as no surprise to the campaigning Hancock. There is undoubtedly a gravy train mentality among expatriate aid officials and consultants in the ...”

“... are rapidly delegitimising each other by rubbing elbows,’ exaggerates the American sociologist Pierre van den Berghe, who nonetheless senses a real danger. The random violence in Natal and elsewhere gives a foretaste of the anarchy ready to emerge if the rational charterist project of non-racialism fails. How often can Mandela afford to be ignored when he ...”

“... sentimental traveller; the Fin-de-Siècle Eberhardt was lapped in the melancholy orientalising of Pierre Loti, eager to romanticise her extraordinary background as the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic mother and a gloomy anarchist tutor with a passion for cacti. Both women seem to have let cross-dressing exaggerate the sense of role-playing that all ...”

“... experience of what is going on, and is not actually a soldier at all. (Neither was Tolstoy’s Pierre at the Battle of Borodino.) The innocent on the battlefield can itself then become something of a standard formula. But it can also be made use of in ways that are contextually effective, and surprisingly original. That is what David Piper contrived to do ...”