“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... midshipman called Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, set off with his older brother Pierre to explore the Mississippi River. Bienville was 18; his brother, the Sieur d’Iberville, was 37. Their goal was to establish a settlement near the mouth of the Mississippi, thus blocking entry to the channel to Spain and England, both of which had sent ...”

“... on ancient philosophy) is not for them. Others now writing – Geoffrey Lloyd, Walter Burkert, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Josiah Ober, Andrea Nightingale come to mind – do much more in very different ways to respond to the cultural density and complexity of ancient Greek thought, and to explore its development within broader or more specific historical ...”

“... tally at all with the historical Lisa. This idea was current in the mid-17th century, when Father Pierre Dan felt compelled to clear her name: she was, he insisted, ‘a virtuous Florentine lady, and not as some have said a courtesan’. Two scraps of documentation exist for the painting prior to Vasari’s account. The first mention of it is by Antonio de ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the main character, a young mulatta, thinks mostly about her affair with a good-looking Frenchman, Pierre Vauclain, and her disastrous marriage to another, older Frenchman, a cynic and a dog, on the Caribbean island where the novel is set. That thinking goes round in decreasing circles of desperation and allows the novel itself to think the bigger thoughts ...”

“... Accordingly, Glock brought in more orchestras and foreign conductors (he particularly admired Pierre Boulez), and extended the repertoire backwards to the Renaissance and forwards into the second half of the 20th century. This meant serious confrontation with Sargent, as Glock reduced the number of concerts that he was allowed to conduct, and also urged ...”

“... party members, and so on. I was happy to leave this to career politicians, to people like Gérard Pierre-Charles, and along with others, he began working along these lines as soon as democracy was restored. He helped found the Organisation Politique Lavalas (OPL) and I encouraged people to join it. This party won the 1995 elections, and by the time I finished ...”