“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Rear Courtyard and House are indifferent to the academic notion of finish – which, as Pierre Bourdieu once put it, aims at ‘transforming the painting into a literary work’ by effacing all reference to the painting’s pictorial and material specificity. But the painting is equally distant from the rising aesthetic of the unfinished, which ...”

“... into the work of the Italian bishop Simone Maioli, from where it was borrowed by the French judge Pierre de Lancre for his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, published in Paris in 1612. De Lancre turned to the Livonian evidence (though he thought the story might have come from Reggio rather than Riga) to help him explain the case of Jean ...”

“... in 1749 as The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling and translated into French a year later by Pierre-Antoine de La Place as L’Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé, Fielding’s masterpiece is a bravura display of social satire, narrative pyrotechnics and destabilising ambiguities and ironies. Thematically, it pursues questions that were of ...”

“... East London. The ménage bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the second half of Melville’s Pierre (1852) – the hero moves to urban bohemia to live out a rescue fantasy with two women, one dark and the other fair, in chaste superiority to society’s misunderstanding, and struggles to make a living from his art – and a similar miasma of incest and ...”

“... the Germans asked for the use of airfields in Syria and Lebanon. Darlan, who had replaced Pierre Laval as Pétain’s deputy in December 1940 in what de Gaulle called ‘a palace revolution that expelled the Grand Vizier’, met Hitler in Berchtesgaden in May 1941 to accede to Germany’s request for use of the airfields. Britain responded by invading ...”

“... with a heavily quantitative emphasis. A leading role was taken by demographic historians such as Pierre Goubert, whose study of the Beauvais region in the 17th and 18th centuries appeared in a new series of monographs on demography and society published from 1960 on. These dealt with real people as well as with statistics, though often the people were seen ...”

“... of celebrity, García Márquez, like Hemingway, has fallen victim to a twisted version of what Pierre Bourdieu once called the ‘biographical illusion’. Perhaps it takes a biography like this one for us to understand that, and in any event it does not diminish him as one of the great novelists of the last half-century. But it leaves one wishing, for the ...”

“... this one, which pays out the multiple strands in the myth of Helen of Troy. Greek tragedy, Jean-Pierre Vernant wrote, presents its protagonists as objects of debate, not examples of good conduct or even heroes deserving of sympathy; the same can be said of characters in epic, like Helen. Laurie Maguire’s literary biography of Helen of Troy makes us face ...”

“... people were gathered in asylums. Before this, it would have been impossible to identify, as Jean-Pierre Falret and Jules Baillarger did independently in 1854, a ‘circular insanity’ or folie à double forme characterised by a regular alternation of manic excitation and melancholic depression. In 1899, Emil Kraepelin wove all these threads into what he ...”

“... for his Moscow staircase in 1909. When, many years later, the painter’s art-dealing son Pierre was asked if his father could have painted such enormous canvases without Shchukin, he replied, ‘Why? For whom?’ (Are they now too fragile to travel?) The next surprising absence is what Shchukin didn’t buy. Acquiring his Picassos between 1909 and ...”

“... works by painters who are very little known to the British public, including Fleury Richard, Pierre Révoil, Henriette Lorimer, François-Marius Granet and Louis Daguerre (famous for his photography but not his paintings). In these works, moonlight on broken stone tracery is a common motif; dark interiors provide a foil for stained glass and for white ...”

“... and the Holy Office put it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Towards the end of the century, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique identified Spinoza as the architect of ‘the most monstrous hypothesis imaginable’, namely ‘systematic atheism’, and denounced him as the founder of a disreputable sect. But Bayle was not too worried: anyone who ...”