“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disturbing purveyor of paradoxes, the erudite and evasive Dutch-based French Protestant exile Pierre Bayle, as the chief influence on Mandeville’s ideas. Bayle won notoriety for his Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682), in which he countered the orthodox consensus that a society of atheists was an impossibility; the prevailing assumption was ...”

“... Quetelet persuaded the Belgian Government to send him to Paris to study astronomy with Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the acknowledged doyen of the discipline. There he imbibed not only Laplace’s celestial mechanics but also his treatises on probability theory and his enthusiasm for criminal statistics – which the French Government had begun to ...”

“... radiograph projector to light aerial photographs of German-held Flanders villages such as St Pierre Capelle, he studied their minutest detail and, taking his lead from the placing of shadows, saw the entire landscape melt into a massive and expertly realised mise-en-scène. The French camouflage section at Amiens may have produced large-scale ...”

“... thoughts never far from his family in Algeria. In 1961, a year before independence, the historian Pierre Nora, a lycée classmate, published a scathing little book, Les Français d’Algérie, pillorying the colons as genocidal in their hatred of Arabs. Derrida sent Nora a 19-page single-spaced letter. He agreed that independence was now inevitable, but ...”

“... Olympism,​ the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city ...”

“... of Marcel Raymond, and then soon after, of Georges Poulet, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became immediately a precious book ...”

“... expounds his own literary genealogy, which includes Tristram Shandy, Nikolai Gogol, Pierre Menard (author of Don Quixote) and many others of what he calls the ‘Sons of La Mancha’. Fuentes has written elsewhere that Cervantes’s great subject is the ‘madness of reading’, a phrase which sounds much much better in Spanish – la locura de ...”

“... a roman à clef about them, as one can about other enormously famous people. In 1974, for example, Pierre Rey did very well with a roman à clef called The Greek which was transparently about the loves and feuds of Aristotle Onassis. But Rey could hide behind the defence that there was more than one rich, libidinous, Greek ship-owner with a taste for opera ...”

“... chapter Douglas represented Melville as presaging a revolt against this enervating fashion. Pierre is a bristlingly harsh challenge to the readers of such books, and the posthumous Billy Budd takes its place with other less literary protests against virtual matriarchy – for instance, muscular Christianity, macho college sports, Social Darwinism and ...”

“... française, the first to examine François Mitterrand’s past as a young Vichy functionary, Pierre Péan also dug into the 1940-45 period of Duras’s life. Adler goes a step further to reconstruct the shadiest aspects of her character. Three interconnected episodes had been skirted around before Péan and Adler: Duras’s involvement with the ...”