“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... other benefits. Richard Cosway refused to allow Maria to practise professionally; Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun was only too keen for his wife to sell her work so that he could pocket the proceeds; and whatever happened in Kauffman’s brief first marriage was so upsetting that she was never able to talk about it. Her late second marriage was to a much older ...”