“... 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 ...”

“... Rights Act. Then came Dallas. Robert ‘was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life’, Pierre Salinger, the administration’s press secretary, recalled of the period after the funeral. ‘He was virtually non-functioning.’ He couldn’t sleep, struggled to concentrate, and stopped caring about his appearance. ‘Jack’s ambitions had been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1923, not long before Lenin died, but a photograph with Trotsky published in the 2003 biography by Pierre Brocheux suggests he was there in 1921. In London, he learned English and worked as a waiter, first in the greasy spoon, then in a posh West End restaurant. A plaque in Piccadilly suggests that he was apprenticed as a sous-chef to Escoffier at the Carlton ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or the Vichy government’s sadistic ‘milice’ – was all around him. An early friend was Pierre Martin; he toiled all night with Rée delivering containers of arms and supplies, but then – only weeks later – sold another SOE agent to the Germans and tried to lure Harry himself into a Gestapo trap. He was executed by the maquis, but not before he ...”

“... probings to Foucault’s refusal to reduce his alienation to a curable ‘unreason’. Taking up Pierre Bertaux’s ‘thesis of the noble simulant’, which explained Hölderlin’s ‘madness’ as a Hamlet-like subterfuge designed to shield him from political persecution, German writers and film-makers of the ‘68 generation pronounced Hölderlin a ...”

“... De Gaulle had taken US entry into the war as a signal that he could launch a crazy invasion of St Pierre et Miquelon, near Newfoundland, which in turn had the US threatening to invoke the Monroe Doctrine. The Polish émigrés in England were equally likely to fly off at a tangent. After Rudolf Hess flew to Britain, Liddell had to act quickly to stop the Poles ...”

“... 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 ...”