“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like these amount to a simultaneous apotheosis and parody of Cartesianism. A patient treated by Pierre Janet – the French physician, philosopher and psychiatrist, writer of sensational case studies of obsession and monomania – put it most succinctly: ‘Undoubtedly I think, but I do not exist.’ ‘Alienation’ and ‘depersonalisation’, the terms ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are so successful at marginalising those who do not ignore it – as French institutions did to Pierre Mendés-France, subject of a moving essay in this book, and undoubtedly a hero. It is the exhilarations rather than the dangers of this collection which leave the longest memory. Hardly any of Johnson’s judgments have been invalidated by time – quite ...”

“... badges to make sure no civilians slipped into sessions on ‘Mayan Textual Practices’ or ‘Pierre Loti Today’. The MLA offers something for everyone, including send-ups of its own proceedings (Session 482 was ‘How to Stop a Long-Winded Speaker: A Metapanel’). On the second day, at 3.30 in the afternoon, there were sessions on Wagnerian ...”

“... on the ‘French Shore’ of Newfoundland and to restrict themselves to the two tiny islands of St Pierre and Miquelon (just 25 miles off the Newfoundland coast), there are still coast-guard stand-offs that pit Canadian fishermen against Breton fishermen, English against French, Canadian French against French French (and when I speak of the Canadian French, I ...”

“... to imagine themselves, cautiously and ambiguously, as Canadians. Gilles Paquet and Jean-Pierre Wallot point out how, long-ensconced, and detached from metropolitan France, the French Canadians developed an identity of antique solidity, without, until very recently, producing a nationalism of their own. Today’s Protestants in Northern Ireland, also ...”

“... long ago and Palestine today. In a different spirit the 19th-century French socialist writer Pierre Leroux learned Hebrew in order to translate, or rather adapt in a dramatic form, the Book of Job, as a lesson on ‘the resurrection and perfectibility of Mankind’. About the same time there was a mass arrest of Jews in Damascus on a charge of ritual ...”

“... roar high up in the branches, and I stop whatever I am doing and look up. Unlike Borges’s Pierre Menard, who heroically dedicates his life to recomposing a number of chapters of Don Quixote in the exact words of the original, Sumner, for whatever reasons, felt driven to leave his personal thumbprint on Bowers’s poem, as he did on the work of other ...”

“... loves his raft: in a sense he does. To choose another metaphor – or rather, to borrow it from Pierre-Jean Rémy, who uses it repeatedly in his book on Callas: in her art she was like a tightrope-walker without a net. But at least from Verona onwards, she had a net in her private life and it was Meneghini. Meneghini himself seems an even less consistent ...”