“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from his aunt and bullies the timid Joseph, who is studying for his medical exams. He goes to see Pierre Schoof, breaks the shop rules by loudly talking German, and when hustled into a back office, asks to borrow money: a large part of his father’s fortune, he reveals, is tied up in Belgium, and he needs to wire 5000 francs immediately in order to release ...”