“... Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,* I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought ...”

“... to wrest power from the doyens of ‘the field of cultural production’, as Carr puts it, quoting Pierre Bourdieu. Setting himself up as arbiter, Pound would have a hand in the editorship of countless magazines, including Poetry, the New Freewoman (later known as the Egoist), the Little Review and the Dial. His protégés, T.S. Eliot and James Laughlin, would ...”

“... right’ and associated ideas – advanced during the Enlightenment by the abbé de St Pierre, Christian Wolff, Jeremy Bentham and others – about how a global society, a civitas maxima, might be established and maintained. The construction of a perpetual peace on this scale would not be possible without treating the coarse timber of an all too ...”

“... French upper-middle-class background ‘that might have been used to illustrate the theses of Pierre Bourdieu’. Despite this insightful modesty, he assumes his readers share precisely this background and its code of sentiments, including its delicate political conservatism and fondness for fatuous gender stereotypes. It’s hard to write about ...”

“... I really feel utterly sickened.’ A few years before, in 1963, Finlay had been insisting to Pierre Garnier that ‘“concrete” by its very limitations offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity; it is very far from the now fashionable poetry of anguish and self.’ Perhaps his gladiatorial side was designed to prove his theory by burning off all ...”

“... expressed openly in France, and Paris had become the undisputed scientific capital of the world. Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique céleste, which described the origins and motions of the solar system in five volumes without once mentioning God, could never have been published in Britain. Mary Somerville’s On the Connection of the Physical Sciences ...”

“... from one great man of science to another: William Herschel, who discovered Uranus in 1781; Pierre-Simon Laplace, who showed that ‘the dynamics of the solar system … were governed by the law of gravitation as Newton had first stated it’; Le Verrier; Edison; Einstein.The Hunt for Vulcan includes several thrillerish elements in its style: date ...”

“... encouraged by powerful influences from the Continent. In his study of the Kabyle of North Africa, Pierre Bourdieu showed how their values were shaped by daily interaction with the objects in their homes. His concept of habitus was founded on the belief that ways of thinking and behaving were closely related to domestic environments. In Germany advocates of ...”

“... father’s mansion in Richmond and reading deeply in the mathematics and astronomy of Herschel and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1830, aged 21, after spells at the University of Virginia and in the army, he enrolled at the West Point military academy, the foremost scientific college in the antebellum United States, which drew its teaching principles and extensive ...”

“... the fifth walk of the philosopher’s Reveries. Seeking refuge on the pastoral island of Saint-Pierre from neighbours who drunkenly stoned his house, with only Thérèse Levasseur (and a few servants) to sustain him, Rousseau enjoys a bit of botany, advises on rabbit-rearing, and dedicates himself to idleness. ‘I let myself float and drift wherever the ...”

“... Schwitters tries this thought again in connection with a quotation from another French poet, Pierre Reverdy: ‘Assis sur l’horizon, les autres vont chanter’ (‘Seated on the horizon, the others will sing’). Encoded here is the recognition that everyday people often create anonymous culture that we ‘experience as an artwork, as chanter,’ and ...”

“... Christianity.One of the most idealistic plans for women in the crusading project was developed by Pierre Dubois, an offbeat political writer, around 1306. In his treatise On the Recovery of the Holy Land, he proposed that the European properties of the crusading orders should be converted into schools where children of both sexes could learn Latin, Greek and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”