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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fluently; when he was awake he could not understand his speech on the tape. In the 19th century Pierre Janet cured a girl of hysterical blindness by taking her back to a trauma at the age of six. Ruth, too, produced vivid and in some cases verifiable memories of her childhood: but she differed importantly from the other cases that have been described by ...”

“... Avignon novel, Hard Punishments, was to be the friendship between two boy heroes: simple, outcast Pierre and André, intelligent and handsome, whose tongue has been torn out for blasphemy. It is clear to me that Cather never came to direct terms with her lesbianism, as O’Brien believes, even while she moved to a respect for heroic feminine ...”

“... of the London Review of Books cast a cold eye on notions of Scottish national revival, citing Pierre Trudcau on ‘Quebec libre’: Trudcau had said the place was likely to be ‘too culturally anaemic, too economically destitute, too intellectually retarded, too spiritually paralysed to survive’. Quebec was not perhaps an inspired choice. Even in ...”

“... and crumbled. The most influential modern biography of the self-styled ‘Louis the Great’, Pierre Goubert’s Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, presents the King as a man whose thirst for glory led the vast majority of his subjects into a condition of ‘primitive, anarchic wretchedness’. Modern historians like to ‘think themselves into the ...”