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“... caught between varying states of complicity and outright defiance. Filmmakers – Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Ophüls, Louis Malle, Claude Berri and recently the creators of Un village français, a seven-season blockbuster for France 3 – have handled the business of improvisation and negotiation much better. Writers were quicker still to ...”

“... their publication. In the early 2000s this person made the papers available to the journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat on condition that nothing would be said about them until Lucette died. Which she did, in 2019, at the age of 107. At that point, Thibaudat announced their existence and Lucette’s executors promptly sued him for ‘concealment of theft’. After ...”

“... shouldn’t waste time settling old scores. In Une Jeunesse française, published in 1994, Pierre Péan revealed that Mitterrand had worked for Vichy before joining the Resistance, and, sensationally, that he had been on friendly terms with Bousquet well into the 1980s. Mitterrand repeatedly refused to apologise for the behaviour of the French state ...”

“... to analysis and the opportunity it gave them to impress with ‘their grandeur or their guilt’ (Pierre Janet’s words). Because of its congestedness it may be difficult to do A Most Dangerous Method justice; it may also be hard to do it an injustice. Freud and Jung were very remarkable men, visionary and systematic, the one more of a scientist, the other ...”

“... Canadians make much of something Pierre Trudeau said in a speech to the Washington Press Club in 1969: ‘Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.’ Canada shares a continental market, the world’s longest undefended border, a language and increasingly a culture with the US, and seems, in recent decades, to have lost its ability to adopt a critical – or even guarded – view of its neighbour when developing and implementing its own foreign policy ...”

“... format. For example, some now treat entire TV shows and Hollywood films as found images: Pierre Huyghe has reshot parts of the Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon with the real-life protagonist (a reluctant bank-robber) returned to the lead role, and Douglas Gordon has adapted a couple of Hitchcock films in drastic ways (his 24 Hour Psycho slows down ...”

“... his way through the entire history of human-composed sound – instinctively, like an accidental Pierre Menard – from Orphic hymn to Gregorian chant to Bach, Ravel, Schoenberg and eventually rock music. He stops leaving the car, even to sleep, and grows physically enormous. As his improvisations evolve into an impossible music that has never been heard ...”

“... into the fraternity of surgeons and cleansed themselves of charlatanism. Jones’s hero is Pierre Fauchard, author of Le Chirurgien-Dentiste (1728), the first modern treatise on dentistry. Fauchard emphasised preservation over removal: ‘I only decide to extract teeth with great regret.’ Dentists abandoned the streets for plush consulting rooms ...”

“... performances and installations staged by artists of his generation like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster – apparently more formal work is too slow.1 For Obrist curating involves not only extensive collaboration but also ‘infinite conversation’. In 2006, with another ‘mentor’, Rem Koolhaas, he ...”

“... idea. Borges is always imagining, even reviewing, potential works. Think of that wonderful list of Pierre Menard’s Nachlass with its Oulipian sounding experiments in French metrics and Boolean logic, essays on modifying the rules of chess, and ‘monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary … which would be ideal objects created ...”

“... diners’ hands have already fondled your focaccia. Order your steak well-done and, unlike Marco Pierre White, Bourdain won’t throw you out of the restaurant: he’ll only give you the rankest piece of meat going. You probably don’t want to know about the rodents. And if all this unsettles your delicate sensibilities, then ‘tant pis, man’. ‘God ...”

“... In all of this women were held responsible for what had been done to them by men – in Holland, Pierre Bayle attacked this hypocrisy, and followed his own logic through to the point of defending abortion and infanticide. No 17th-century English man or woman seems to have had a comparable grasp of gender politics, and at every point the enforcement of a ...”

“... canon that her work most often ran awry. Pissing on Dickens may be one thing, but a writer like Pierre Guyotat is hardly in need of ‘appropriation’ by a white Jewish writer from New York. Too often, her novels were a barrage of attacks on writerly skills she lacked. Her extravagant self-presentation often worked against her too. Attacking capitalism ...”

“... forced to concede. The question now became: what causes the secular acceleration of the Moon? Pierre-Simon Laplace discovered in 1776 that orbits would eventually degrade if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets ...”

“... social planners of those years, such as William Beveridge and Barbara Wootton in Britain, Pierre Laroque and Francis Netter in France, together with many campaigners for a united or federal postwar Europe, were heirs and exemplars of the positivist tradition of social, political and legal thought. Two generations earlier, in the mid-to-late-Victorian ...”