“... spirit from the world of Connemaran sean-nós?’ Cage was commissioned (by West German Radio and Pierre Boulez’s avant-garde foundation IRCAM) to create a composition based on Finnegans Wake. Cage, Robinson wrote, ‘was looking for Irish traditional music as an ingredient of his own musical recreation of [James] Joyce’s work, and when he was told that ...”

“... the adjustments tended to simplify the design, and make it more powerful, as well as grander than Pierre Lescot’s 16th-century buildings on the site. One way of doing this was to eschew profuse ornament of the kind seen on the inner façades of the Cour Carrée. In the final, built version the end pavilions are subordinated to the central one – the ...”

“... goes so far on one occasion as to describe Humanist education (in terms apparently derived from Pierre Bourdieu) as ‘the agent of inherited power, the vehicle by which patrician culture can reproduce itself’. It would have been interesting to see this view worked out in detail, but the author lets the opportunity slip and elsewhere in the book she ...”

“... identity, the self as a seamless web. Already the richly humanistic efforts of Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Bourdieu and Christopher Norris are rescuing the work of Heidegger and de Man without endangering the principle that ideology and text are invariably (if complexly) related. But what do we do with Anthony Blunt? Here was no mere polemicist but an agent of ...”

“... Nachleben of Aristotle, another was the search for a wholly new method associated with the name of Pierre de la Ramée. The advent of the vernacular and the crisis in method together ensured the death of the neo-Latin world of Erasmus, ushering in that of Bacon and Grotius. In the twilight of the age of Erasmus, Robert Burton, ‘that fantastic great old ...”

“... be positive ones as well. The ‘French exotic’ at the end of the 19th century was led off by Pierre Loti and his Last Days of Peking, with its horrendous account of the crushing of the Boxer Uprising. (‘The parks were exquisite in spite of the corpses and the crows,’ he wrote to his wife. So much for that famous peaceableness.) More serious exponents ...”

“... We may note, as Dmitri Nabokov does, that the lovable executioner foreshadows the jolly M’sieur Pierre of Invitation to a Beheading, and it is true that executions of various kinds loom large in Nabokov’s later work. It is their blandness and their bungling that draws his attention, their horrible ordinariness, and in this sense he is consciously ...”

“... his mind off a family disgrace; the ‘epicene waif’, Isabelle Eberhardt, who tried to ‘do a Pierre Loti’ in Algeria; and a self-intoxicated Scot, John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, whose speciality was reaching the source of rivers by canoe, even when the source was a turgid swamp (his lecture called ‘Arma Virumque Canoe’, with practical ...”

“... instant icons of the Modern, and though she often went about in shapeless robes and sandals, Pierre Balmain and Yvonne Davidson were pleased to dress her. ‘She accepted herself as she was,’ wrote Lincoln Steffens. ‘She was large; she dressed as a large woman ... You felt ... her self-contentment and shared her self-composure, but, best of all, the ...”

“... press tended to see it). At the end of the day, Derrida was honoured in the British university. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in Homo Academicus (a work which, oddly, Halsey does not cite), there is less honour for the prophet of Deconstruction in his own country. Bourdieu recalls ‘the astonishment of a certain young American visitor, at the beginning of the ...”

“... his chilly villas, Le Corbusier will not need any more teachers: he has found a name and a voice. Pierre Jeanneret, the competent cousin who was to help make Le Corbusier’s buildings work, turns up fleetingly in the closing pages; henceforward the name Jeanneret will be linked chiefly with him. The argument may be made that even the revolutionary Le ...”

“... and novelist Charlotte Smith, he met and possibly lodged with the hardline revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and is known to have attended a fiery Jacobin Club debate in December 1791. But Brissot broke with the Jacobins a few months later, and Wordsworth’s connections in Paris were chiefly Girondins – like the Jacobins, supporters of revolutionary ...”

“... a very few of Locke’s contemporaries – Spinoza, for instance, and the Huguenot philosopher Pierre Bayle, author of an encyclopedic history of ideas – regarded freedom of religion as a natural right. By the 1760s, however, Voltaire was describing tolerance as ‘the hallmark of humanity’, and Kant followed by arguing that ‘tolerance’ was the ...”

“... connection but also because she had taken the opportunity to settle scores with the firm of Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, Jews whom she considered had swindled her out of profits from Chanel No. 5. It was the intercession of an old society friend, Winston Churchill, that got her off the hook in 1944 and enabled her to retreat to ...”

“... Strata Florida. The experience of reading these volumes is not wholly unlike that of engaging with Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, or Benjamin’s Arcades Project, where reading as an activity is stretched to its limits. Wallace’s book constantly leads its reader to ask, ‘What kind of Europe did I think I knew? What kind of Middle Ages did I think I ...”