“... brothers; and, like Malraux’s voluble conversation, they include remarkable insights. As Pierre Rosenberg, a curator at the Louvre, put it: ‘Suddenly in this torrent of words you find a sort of diamond.’ The final reproach addressed to André Malraux was that from 1945 onwards he threw in his lot with General Charles De Gaulle, first as Minister ...”

“... passed many men of account in the social sciences in France: Aron, Lévi-Strauss, Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, Serge Moscovici ... In French, what is more, we do not talk of the ‘social sciences’ so much as the ‘human sciences’, which, simply on the lexical plane, establishes a bridge between the young sociology (for example) and the old, but ...”

“... is like other American writers, including Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, James, and the Melville of Pierre, in contriving ‘to present the conviction of reality best by making it, in most readers’ eyes, remote’. Stevens, in one of his many moods, said that the American poet tries ‘to make the visible a little hard to see’. What these several witnesses ...”

“... it can also assist the interpretation of literature, the more so now that we know that not only Pierre Louÿs and Swinburne but women as different as Edith Wharton and Anais Nin wrote – what? Wharton: erotica? Nin: pornography? (Hers, like the French police official’s, was ‘bespoke’.) Some day an alert or lucky explorer of erotica will identify the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... regionalism of Europe. The acceptable face of the Centre-Right, Jacques Chirac’s Premier, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, is the author of We Are All Regionalists Now, which draws on Mitterrand’s 1981 decentralisation. Equally adept is Edmund Stoiber’s shadow economics minister, Lothar Späth, CDU Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg in the 1980s. Späth ...”

“... the French side of the border, and it was this panic which had given rise to the famous mission of Pierre de Lancre to the pays de Labourd. De Lancre’s operations naturally stimulated similar fears and tensions in Spanish Navarre. Soon the three Inquisitors at Logroño were in violent disagreement, with Salazar appealing over the heads of his more credulous ...”

“... Horreur pourquoi? Vois-tu pas son oeil de lumière ... Non: il s’en va, froid, sous sa pierre.                         * Bonsoir – ce crapaud-là, c’est moi. Pilling’s translation serves the modest purpose of elucidating the original, though we forfeit the evocative, flirtatious, nocturnal small talk of ...”

“... This, he says, is what the later Wittgenstein was talking about, what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has tried to capture in his notion of the ‘habitus’. It’s the taken-for-granted world. Some have thought of it as unconscious. That won’t do. Conscious mental states minus the consciousness is an empty riddle. The behaviourist account is ...”

“... the Seventies, the report that had led to the loss of several orchestras and the start of Radio 3, Pierre Boulez was appointed as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and embarked on a series of revelatory discussion concerts at the Round House – although they failed to impress Newby’s successor, Stephen Hearst. Hearst wished, on the whole, to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... day will come when the day will not come’ – Virilio was inspired at the age of 18 by the Abbé Pierre and the movement of worker-priests and became a Christian and a militant. Those convictions still affect him 47 years later. Apparently unimpressed by the success of New Age cults and American-style evangelism, Virilio fears that we are losing touch with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Kilgore Trout ... The poetry of John Shade ... The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Menard.’ It’s a bit reminiscent of the hybrid Russian-American world Nabokov invented for Ada. Here, John Kennedy wasn’t shot in Dallas but years later, along with his President-brother Bobby, by a magically bouncing Palestinian bullet, and the ...”

“... 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 ...”