“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pierre Boulez took his final bow in the opera pit last summer at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the production was the music chosen: Leoš Janáček’s opera From the House of the Dead, written in 1928, the final year of his life. Boulez seemed a little ambivalent about the choice ...”

“... definitive about it: well-regarded artists who have emerged over the last twenty years, such as Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tino Sehgal among many others, don’t require such space, and in many ways refuse it. (Bigness has also led to bad by-products like immense atria, which, however important they are to museums as event spaces, are deadly as ...”

“... the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the crowd was enough to ...”

“... 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 ...”