“... army. This abortive escape attempt only deepened fears of foreign invasion. In the autumn, Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the Girondins began to advocate pre-emptive strikes against German states harbouring French nobles and priests. A new revolutionary nationalism prevailed, symbolised by the tricolore, liberty trees and the song ‘Ça ira’. Before ...”

“... wasn’t allowed to forget her lowly origins, however, or her gender. In 1922, the art historian Pierre du Colombier wrote that she had ‘a commoner’s sensitivity’, along with ‘a woman’s meanness, agitated and in spite of itself, sensitive’. Herriot, meeting her at her château in Saint-Bernard, near Lyon, when she was 66, described watching her ...”

“... to shake up the town. The closest thing we had was the invocation of the War Measures Act by Pierre Trudeau in October 1970, after a series of kidnappings by Quebec separatists. Soldiers with machine guns were posted across the city. Now, more than fifty years after his father called in the army, hundreds of enormous rigs were rolling into town and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 concert hall. ‘Surrealist music’ is thin on the ground, though it could be argued that Pierre Schaeffer’s pioneering work with musique concrète in the late 1940s shifted the paradigm of composition towards a more hands-on, automatist methodology that chimed with surrealist practice. Vergo is good on paintings that turn on musical principles or ...”

“... writer. Fingers elegantly interlaced, he poses in a tapestried chair of the studio photographer Pierre Petit (of place Cadet, Paris); he is in morning dress, with a huge knot to his tie and the visible ribbon of the Légion d’honneur (which dates the portrait to post-1900). He looks worldly, a confident man of achievement: perhaps a city mayor whose ...”

“... with the French thinkers who influenced its author. Those who have never encountered the logician Pierre Nicole, or the jurist Jean Domat, or the reactionary thinker Louis de Bonald, may well find, as they shovel their way through snowdrifts of references, that Jaume ne vaut pas le voyage. Given that few people acquire such knowledge without also picking up ...”

“... of his earliest performances – he called it an ‘action work’ – was staged at Jean-Pierre Wilhelm’s Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf in November 1959. In a letter that year, he explained that Hommage à John Cage: Music for Audiotapes and Piano was composed around three ten-minute movements, each containing a number of cultural references. The first ...”

“... been part of American politics. The diplomatic path to the Louisiana Purchase was cleared by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a well-connected French aristocrat whom Jefferson befriended while serving as minister to France in 1787. He met with Napoleon early in the negotiations, at Jefferson’s behest. Du Pont held no formal office. When Livingston’s ...”

“... an equal contemporary of Leiris, Michaux and Bataille (an odd alignment, all things considered); Pierre de Boisdeffre placed him with Jean Giono, Céline and Queneau. This will doubtless come as some surprise to those for whom Simenon means only the Maigret novels. In fact, of the 192 novels he published under his own name, 75 were romans policiers and the ...”