“... the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy and Shatford are dead. The Perfect Storm is reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s ‘The Open Boat’. Crane’s masterful short story, based on his own experience, describes the ordeal of four men in an open boat after a shipwreck. It ...”

“... case have to be lent on to yield a usable meaning. One of the exceptions is the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, whose remark ‘One cannot liberate the victims of symbolic violence by decree’ Moi takes very seriously. What it means is that you have to spell out the arguments step by step, and that even then the class-system in the intellectual ...”

“... is impressive. Even the early works, in which she sometimes collaborated with her studio partner, Pierre Kéfer, are remarkably innovative and effective, clearly enlivened by what might be called ‘the effects of Surrealism’. Especially striking is her portrait of Christian (‘Bébé’) Bérard as a jovial latter-day John the Baptist, his head neatly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... His hobby, a primitive form of sampling, was given validation when he heard a recording of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète on the radio. ‘There were adults in the world who took it seriously. I felt like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s footprint in the sand.’At Johns Hopkins University, where his major was art history, Murch collaborated ...”

“... work to date, a direct response to the upheaval of May 1968. The next year Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin founded a Maoist film-making collective, the Dziga Vertov group, named after the Soviet agitprop film-maker of the Twenties, founder of the Kino-Eye movement. Starting with ideas about ‘Brechtian’ or ‘guerrilla’ cinema, Godard’s radicalism ...”

“... ancient for Nabonidus as Marcus Aurelius is for us. He glued it back together and re-erected it. Pierre Briant’s greatest achievement in his encyclopedic history of the Persian Empire, From Cyrus to Alexander, translated, with a few additions, from Histoire de l’Empire perse (1996), is the range of material he manages to include.* Something of that range ...”

“... had contact, and his son Dany, commander of the Tiger militia. Gradually the Mossad preference for Pierre Gemayel and his extreme right-wing Phalangist militia (later to become the Lebanese Forces) prevailed. Pierre Gemayel had been to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and had found the Nazis inspiring; his militia was now being ...”

“... customs to the most complete indifference to what other people might think.’ Sixty years later, Pierre Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel saved up all its anecdotes on the subject of eccentricity for the article on originalité: ‘What we call an original is what the English more accurately call an eccentric.’ In France, an ‘eccentric’ was an ...”

“... Their habit is to disguise truth rather than disclose it. The aim of critique, as the philosopher Pierre Macherey remarked, is to know the work as it cannot know itself. Like most of us, works of literature are rather more spiritually dishevelled than they care to appear, and the task of critique is to lay bare their blindspots and ambiguities. In ...”

“... detect winks towards Borges’s celebrated short fictions of doubling, ‘Borges and I’ and ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. In the latter, a modern author writes down short sections of Don Quixote as if they were his own. Parini, however, had never heard of Borges until he met Alastair Reid in St Andrews; nor had he read Don Quixote; but ...”

“... but the same plate might be repurposed to produce images revised for a new political moment. Pierre Lombart issued an engraving in 1655 of Oliver Cromwell, splendid in armour on horseback. Times changed. The head was removed and replaced with Louis XIV’s; then the head was switched back to Cromwell’s, then to Charles I’s, and finally – collectors ...”