“... usual untidy series of negligent touches. Tolstoy learnt a great deal from Stendhal, creating in Pierre and Prince André totally assembled and computed characters in the same style. Tolstoy also, as authors habitually do, learnt how to describe battle, not from his own experience of it, which easily rivalled Stendhal’s own, but from the Stendhalian ...”

“... Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in 1931, going around to the galleries. We went to the Pierre Colle Gallery in the Rue de la Boétie where there was a show of Dali’s. Dali came in poor and emaciated. He had no suit jacket and wore a raincoat over his shirt. We all went into the back room and saw a big painting with an opalescent sky – The ...”

“... good as well as evil. In his study Sociologie et Canonisations (1969), the Belgian sociologist Pierre Delooz suggested that some societies are ‘programmed’ to perceive sanctity and that new saints are perceived according to the stereotypes of older ones. S. Carlo Borromeo was seen as a new St Ambrose, S. Filippo Neri as a new St Francis, and so ...”

“... it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length.’ Her view of the matter is similar to that of Pierre-Daniel Huet, a 17th-century French critic she greatly admires; he thought the novel came from Spain, after the Arabs had taught the Spanish ‘the art of novelising’. The rest of Europe learnt it from the Spaniards. ‘It is wonderfully refreshing to ...”

“... asks for a method that would generate the triples of integers satisfying Pythagoras’ equation. Pierre de Fermat, a professional jurist, passionate part-time mathematician and author of many splendid number theorems, thought about the obvious extension of Diophantus’ question: could a cube, for example, 27 (= 33) or 1000 (= 103), be split into a sum of ...”

“... to Copernicus’s position at the Cathedral of Frauenburg) or a profound epistemologist (as did Pierre Duhem, a 19th-century physicist, philosopher, historian and Catholic apologist, who praised Copernicus’s grasp of the instrumental character of scientific theories). Both were wrong. The preface to De revolutionibus was written not by Copernicus but by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... did not appear during Mallarmé’s lifetime, and when they were first published in 1961 by Jean-Pierre Richard, under the title Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole, they revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarmé, one which even now disturbs the idea of him as the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. My translation here is based on Bertrand Marchal’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tour (until 17 August). McEwen was respectful of the tradition of flower painting epitomised by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, on whom he wrote an undergraduate thesis, but the exhibition’s suggestion that McEwen was ‘the Redouté of our time’ is somewhat misleading. His work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious ...”

“... happy to drink of this smoke.’ We read in an account prepared half a century later by the Jesuit Pierre Biard that the Canadian savages ‘also used petun and they drank the smoke.’ That tobacco was used by the native North Americans on occasions of a ritual nature did not escape many European observers. It is again ...”

“... into the night. Guattari was manic. ‘He needed something like Ritalin,’ his colleague Jean-Pierre Muyard recalled. ‘We had to find a way to calm him down.’ It was Muyard, who had studied philosophy with Deleuze at the University of Lyon, who arranged the first meeting between the two men. Guattari had drawn on Deleuze’s critique of structuralism ...”

“... just two members – Godard and a young man ‘better than me in thinking and philosophy’, Jean-Pierre Gorin – and broke up in 1973. Godard’s relationship with Anne-Marie Miéville began during his convalescence from a 1971 motorcycle accident in which he was badly injured, and their collaboration has been the longest lasting of his career. They put ...”