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“... 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 ...”

“... materials burning under the earth in Africa seemed not to think there was any harm in trying. Pierre Barrère, a doctor from Perpignan, was the only contributor who published his essay and the only one to draw directly on colonial experience. He was proud of his approach, which he said was rooted in empirical observation. He had served as the botaniste du ...”

“... was the inspiration for Beryl Bainbridge’s novel Master Georgie, but he has most in common with Pierre at the Battle of Borodino. Though a civilian, he was well-born and, armed with letters of introduction from Prince Albert, empowered to move between camps, socialising with officers and generals as he went.) Memorialising again, he cajoled a Captain Brown ...”

“... early 17th century and has been a particular favourite in times of war or civil unrest. As Jean-Pierre Seguin wrote in his study of 19th-century French street literature: ‘This story was well known, in more or less related versions, and had a prodigious success . . . infantrymen, sailors, simple soldiers and officers, legionnaires, decorated ...”