“... 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 ...”

“... spice merchant; it also involved a visit to Les Halles for eggs and fruit, to the dairy market of Pierre-au-Lait for good, rich milk, and to the Place de Grève for firewood and coal. And then there was the management of the servants hired for the day: a cook and assistants, waiters, water servers and bouncers (‘big, strong ushers to guard the door’). The ...”

“... in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status ...”

“... of the fluidity of the ritual in practice, I was reminded of the scene in War and Peace where Pierre Bezukhov is being initiated into the Freemasons: as he is told to lie down at a certain point, he hears one of the brothers whisper, ‘He should get the trowel first,’ only to be hushed by someone else. If the dynamics of the triumph are fluid, so must ...”

“... be very unlikely to deny entry to one of its allies, or indeed to a reputable shipping company. As Pierre Trudeau said in 1969, ‘to close off those waters and to deny passage to all foreign vessels in the name of Canadian sovereignty . . . would be as senseless as placing barriers across the entrances of Halifax and Vancouver harbours.’ Washington’s ...”

“... word ‘radioactive’ was first used in public on 18 July 1898, when Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, reported to the French Academy of Sciences on the progress of their work on becquerel rays – what we would now call ionising radiation. The Curies had subjected pitchblende, a black mineral composed largely of uranium dioxide, to repeated heating, then ...”

“... the resulting archive (supplemented by the records rescued by the Russian diplomat and bibliophile Pierre Dubrowsky) for much of his writing life. He began his research for the History of Madness there. Foucault returned to the Bastille archives and the idea of ‘a great compilation of infamy’ after the publication of Discipline and Punish and The Will to ...”

“... dominant explanations in the 20th century were those of Walter Burkert, on the one hand, and Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, on the other. Burkert explained sacrifice in terms of collective psychology and human evolution, seeing the ritual as a relic of guilt at the killing of other beings and a technique for managing aggression. Vernant and ...”

“... the camera, and yet another new portfolio starts at B with the Bloch twins and their brother Jean-Pierre. From here to the end, alphabetical order breaks down. Additional faces and bodies of children without names appear in these pictures, not to speak of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of adults: mothers and fathers, grandparents, nurses, older brothers and ...”

“... plays his part’. It was to be based on elite co-optation, within what the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon calls the ‘Franco-African state’. This was not a formula involving a series of relationships between the erstwhile colonial power on the one hand, and the newly independent states on the other, but a unitary Jacobin entity, with big brothers and ...”

“... contemporary accounts of torture and assassinations by leading anti-war militants, in particular Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Henri Alleg.The title of Branche’s new book – Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? – suggests a continuation of this muckraking, but the subtitle points to a shift in focus: ‘An Inquiry into a Family Silence’. Branche’s aim is ...”

“... of the composer’s death in 1969. That year came two editions of the Memoirs, one edited by Pierre Citron, the other David Cairns’s translation. Critical editions of Berlioz’s other writings, and his Correspondance Générale, are well advanced; critical and analytical scholarship has moved into top gear in Germany, the United States and ...”

“... marital adventures. Soon after his father’s death in 1919, he married Catherine Hessling, one of Pierre-Auguste’s models. He began to make films as a showcase for her talents (or at least, ambitions) and their marriage broke down when he continued to make films without her. Reputed to resemble her ferociously vain and fortune-seeking screen ...”