“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... objects (the heritage industry) might be a sign of our loss of authentic memory, as it was for Pierre Nora in his monumental survey of the French construction of a national past, Les Lieux de mémoire. If we accept that there is no architecturally embodied identity of a nation or people, that our current historical existence is not vitally wrapped up in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we condone this state of affairs, art seems to be making us worse, not better. Carey agrees with Pierre Bourdieu that having a taste for art is more a mark of class than anything else, although one has to remember that working-class people have been known to enjoy The Well-Tempered Clavier, and that some middle-class folk admire La Traviata. But for Carey ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... having searched in vain for Yeats’s grave, questioned the local priest, Abbé Biancheri, and Pierre Reynault, director of Maison Roblot, a firm of undertakers at Menton; they also visited Roquebrune Town Hall. They were told that Yeats had been buried in a ‘fosse commune’, a pauper’s grave, and that the site had long since been dug up and the bones ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”