“... 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 ...”

“... interiors were created’ but briskly defers in his concluding pages to such modern authorities as Pierre Bourdieu who, like his followers among the contributors to the New Museology, smugly explains away the complex relationship with the past which the great collections and the museums of the last century ...”

“... celebratory preface to Madame Edwarda, but still maintained that the story had been written by ‘Pierre Angélique’, is not irrelevant. For one thing, in 1956 one could still be fined or jailed in France for obscene publishing; and Bataille’s hide-and-seek games indicate that he was a perverse writer in more ways than one. He must have delighted in the ...”

“... of the mark. In emphasising Roussel’s importance to Duchamp, Seigel omits any mention of Jean-Pierre Brisset, whom the artist couples with Roussel as an exemplar, describing him as ‘the Douanier Rousseau of philology’. Brisset was no bourgeois but the son of illiterate country folk. He plied many trades and fortuitously acquired modest fame as fou ...”

“... regalia at a ‘Blackshirt’ dinner. When the Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare fixed up a deal with Pierre Laval, the French Foreign Secretary and a Nazi fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically supported it when it was ...”

“... or someone else, it was always like that.” ’ This was reported in a touching interview with Pierre Cabanne published in L’Oeil in May 1974. The word used was violait, but in a context where it should be translated as ‘ravish’ not ‘rape’. Marie-Thérèse a moment before this replied to the question ‘How was your life with Picasso?’ as ...”

“... Ohio, but we are far from the gothic family romance lived out by Old Hickory or the author of Pierre. In the lives of the Great Communicator and his admiring people, the central point of intersection between history and psyche has shifted from the family to the movies. It is there that personal symbols and political discourse converge, there that the ...”

“... bands, they extended this behaviour to Creation. Their critics, like the waspish French scientist Pierre Duhem, thought this mechanical obsession was a typically British weakness: ‘we thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered abode of reason,’ Duhem complained on opening a textbook by one of Maxwell’s disciples, ‘but we find ourselves ...”

“... that quintessential 19th-century malady, hysteria. On a few occasions they were simply stumped. Pierre de Rudder, a Flemish labourer, broke his leg so badly he spent a year in bed in terrible pain. His doctors found a three-centimetre gap separating the two parts of the unset bone, and counselled amputation. Instead de Rudder went to Lourdes, and was ...”

“... feeling in the age has supplied. In this case it was the famous romantic novel by Bernardin de St Pierre, Paul et Virginie, in which a young couple are brought up together in the beauties of the tropic wilderness, are all in all to each other, and die together before any hint of sexuality can appear in their relations. William knew the book well, and so did ...”

“... by the French publication of the revised text of Proust’s novel, and that appeared in 1954, when Pierre Clarac and André Ferré produced their fine Pléiade edition. The differences between the text of that and the earlier text were not momentous but they were significant; they grow more frequent and more radical in the later sections of the novel. They are ...”

“... His ambition is to get beyond both, taking as his guides E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine. There is a strong dash of Marxism in his fountain of inspiration. In his scrutiny of the Sikh community, he stresses its diversity, as between urban and rural, higher and lower social or caste strata, and, very prominently, its ...”

“... Science is currently poised for its assault on the last two great peaks of ignorance. Having struggled with immense labour across the foothills of physics and biology, it has set up camp at the foot of cosmology and consciousness. Which will be the first to go? Will we understand the origin of the universe before we understand consciousness, or will consciousness be conquered first? If the problems are truly fundamental, they will be found to be united, and the assault on either will facilitate the assault on the other ...”

“... comparisons with Italy are indispensable and telling. It must, for instance, be significant that Pierre Subleyras, the one French religious painter of outstanding quality, should have spent virtually his entire working life in Italy. Almost alone among the French, Subleyras was consistently able to master, without any sense of strain, the grand manner of the ...”