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“... 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 ...”

“... they added murder to their CV. Louis was sentenced to death in absentia, while his younger brother Pierre was caught and executed. Fleeing from the law, Mandrin crossed the border into what Kwass calls the ‘wild east’ of Savoy, then a province of the Italian kingdom of Sardinia whose rugged terrain and large population of poor itinerant workers made it an ...”

“... In​ 2007 France’s leading Slavist, Georges Nivat, following the example of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, published a similar survey of Russia, Les Sites de la mémoire russe. Russia’s history, he remarked, was inexhaustibly rich, but susceptible to constant reinterpretation and punctuated by black holes: events that the authorities at any given time preferred their subjects to forget ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about him keep appearing: literary and philosophical essays by Jean-Claude Milner (2003), Jean-Pierre Richard (2006) and Eric Marty (2006), a gossipy biography of his last years by Hervé Algalarrondo (2006), a chapter about his piano-playing by François Noudelmann (2008). And now we have two new/old texts by Barthes himself, transcriptions of his notes ...”

“... and indistinguishable multiplex fodder. In the same breath, she cites with disapproval Jean-Pierre Oudart’s enthusiasm about Kubrick’s The Shining, Pascal Bonitzer’s admiration of Scorsese’s ‘Dostoevskian sensibility’ in Raging Bull and Narboni’s praise of Spielberg’s E.T.: ‘Intelligent, inventive, moving, mischievous … this film ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knowing the stories just makes things worse. Not that we have any choice. Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Mary Lamb, Alice James, Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old ...”

“... well done for that . . . the sun has burned your face a bit too much,’ a maître d’ called Pierre tells the narrator when he applies for a job as a waiter.) The Iranian torturer who patronises the restaurant where the narrator works is accompanied by a Canadian bodyguard – ‘Canada is selling weapon parts to Iran . . . They want to make sure he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... block – seems to have accepted when he ordered the governor-general of the Congo, Pierre Ryckmans, to keep the colony at least neutral until they saw how the war turned out. Ryckmans, however, declared for the Allies, as did Belgium’s ‘free’ government-in-exile. That wasn’t the end of the matter. Leopold was still in place in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What a very different face of things is seen in Roderick Cavaliero’s Admiral Satan, a life of Pierre-André de Suffren, the French commander who led the Royal Navy such a dance in the Indian Ocean during the 1780s. Whereas Bligh appears to have possessed no personal authority – no authority at all apart from his commission – Suffren overflowed with ...”

“... the rich Renaissance epigraphs, from Shakespeare, Burton, Spenser, and Dekker, William Turner and Pierre Erondell, Drayton and Sidney, which like the buildings of the university town marshal a reader’s progress and whisper, in their proportions and through their gargoyles, of older traditions than our own, and less happy endings than the reader is offered ...”

“... salons, in Whitman’s house, at Mallarmé’s mardis, in cafés with the young Gide and Pierre Louÿs. His power to inspire affection was extraordinary, and it depended on more than wit and fancy: he made people love him. But he also gave envy some wonderful opportunities, and knew that he was doing so. ‘Of course I knew there would be a ...”