“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for a single source of Vedic and Greek prosody on the basis of research by the musicologists Pierre Aubry and Maurice Emmanuel. In turn, Emmanuel’s theory of additive rhythm was taken up by his student Olivier Messiaen. Jules Combarieu’s La Musique et la magie (1909) argued that secular and religious song had their roots in magical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... own right: Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The purest example of the species, however, was undoubtedly Pierre-Augustin Caron, better known as Beaumarchais. Born the son of a bourgeois watchmaker in 1732, he became a familiar figure at the French court while still in his early twenties, after which his life comprised an almost entirely uninterrupted series of ...”