“... 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 ...”

“... to be ignored by those in need of papers. The first request came from a former Resistance comrade, Pierre Mouchenik, alias Pierrot, who requested papers for Jewish Displaced Persons seeking to go to Palestine. Kaminsky declined at first; he did not want to become involved in illegal activities. But when Pierrot took him to Germany in January 1946 to see one of ...”

“... of the Protestant beast, they had initially followed the opinion of Loyola’s close colleague Pierre Favre that dealing with Protestants should be a matter of Christian witness, ‘speaking with them familiarly on those topics which we have in common and avoiding all contentious arguments in which one party might seem to beat the other’. By 1550 the ...”

“... too, provided it wasn’t Jewish. They ‘tried to seduce rather than impose their will’, as Pierre Boulez recalled, and on the whole they succeeded. They presided over a boom in sales of contemporary art and went out of their way to protect leading artists: Georges Braque showed 35 works in the Salon d’Automne in 1943, and was offered free coal to ...”

“... an inspired aperçu from near the end of War and Peace – which Tolstoy wrote in his prime. Pierre brings the old Countess Rostov a miniature of her dead husband in a locket. So far from being grateful she becomes irritable, for it happened this was not the right time of the day for indulging recollections about her old spouse the Count. Her routine has ...”

“... traditions in excellent detail, for example; but he does not have much to say about the Jews, whom Pierre Birnbaum recently described as ‘Les fous de la République’. One would like to know more also about the para-political myths of rural and urban life (George Sand and Flaubert) or the Walter Benjamin myth of Paris as the capital of the 19th ...”

“... about the whole business of literary criticism. I remember my own fondness for two novels by Pierre-Jean Jouve, and how this disgusted Michel almost to the point of nausea.) Apart from the always disconcerting question of why novelists may be utterly despised by their fellow-countrymen and revered by foreigners, this generous lack of belief in the ...”

“... dignitaries played pool with European diplomats, drinking German beer, smoking English cigarettes. Pierre Loti danced at the Rokumeikan: ‘A little too gaudy, too fancy ... And then the suit of tails, so ugly even on us, how strangely they wear them! Of course, they are not equipped with the right back for this sort of thing; it is impossible to say why ...”

“... Water is news in Thatcherite Britain in a way that would have surprised politicians – or economists – a generation ago. In some parts of the world, like California or Colorado, water has always been politics – bitter, tough, even violent politics. On a global scale we divide the world into arid and non-arid zones and probe the oceans. Some of our greatest engineering projects in every generation, back to the ancient world, have been concerned with the movement and control of water ...”

“... and a clutch of visiting authors, academics, curators and journalists, among them the novelist Pierre Michon, a small man with grey cropped hair who confided to me one evening that he was no longer interested in writing, he was only interested in his baby daughter Louise; and the saturnine Rimbaud scholar Claude Jeancolas, editor of impeccably fine-tuned ...”

“... America, and that the way of life associated with them is worth preserving. The attempt to prevent Pierre Trudeau’s constitutional package being passed by the British Parliament is one example of the militancy which the leaders of Canada’s native peoples have recently been displaying. Another is their revival of aboriginal claims to land use ...”

“... it into one of the most heavily-researched areas of our discipline. There were even those, like Pierre Caron, the national archivist, who thought that by 1945 all had been said. Confronted with the young Richard Cobb, about to begin his Herculean labours, he advised some alternative field of study. ‘Monsieur,’ he said kindly, ‘vous êtes venus trop ...”

“... sagged all too easily into an expression of guarded sadness (‘Et Jim? Toujours triste?’ asked Pierre Vago, his almost exactly opposite number in Paris, one time). Together with his conspicuous personal reticence, this gave rise to a legend of ‘almost pathological shyness’ that persists to this day. It seems, on reflection, that the reticence must have ...”

“... and even to be criticised, actors becoming observers of themselves. To employ the terms of Pierre Bourdieu (Outline of a Theory of Practice, published in this country in 1977), right/left moved out of the doxa, the universe of the undiscussed and undisputed, into the field of opinion, the universe of discourse and argument. How was this breakthrough ...”

“... his pages clean. How do we get from this aristocratic prejudice to the artisanal modern footnote? Pierre Bayle takes us a long way. His enormous Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) consists largely of footnotes and footnotes to footnotes (some being source citation, some scurrilous or bawdy, the whole a mass of various erudition). Bayle (as we are not ...”