“... and at the museum of modern art in Niteroi, Brazil, the next. Dior staged an extravaganza at Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles outside Cannes, and Gucci organised elaborate pyrotechnics for its show in an ancient Roman cemetery near Arles.Enninful’s book has its own dramatic contrasts, between his early childhood on a Ghanaian military base, hearing the ...”

“... the liberal theorist and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, link arms with them as they pass through its euphoria, confusion and violence, and track their steps as they re-emerge into the post-revolutionary world.It’s an approach that might be made to ...”

“... to a Tarrytown estate. Duchamp and Picabia are shown arriving in a red sports car; Henri Pierre-Roché lies face-down, spread-eagled on the grass; the collector Leo Stein crouches with his ear trumpet to hear Ettie, who is reading aloud from a book. Although Florine spoke and wrote French fluently, she paid Duchamp $2 an hour to give her lessons ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 hand of Mérimée’s Carmen, the first woman in literature to accept one, or of Callistô in Pierre Louÿs’s story, ‘Une nouvelle volupté’ (she ‘threw away the unsmoked half, where the rouge on her lips had left lipstick traces’), stands for honest-to-god eroticism – and, in Carmen especially, for availability. For the woman who smokes to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they rarely commented on the ‘Franco-African state’ (a term coined by the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon), which then existed in all but name as a result of the slow-motion decolonisation orchestrated by Paris and African elites. In France, most people viewed the African ‘protectorate’ as a safeguard for their nation’s ranking in a world now ...”

“... more than a brief, pitying glance at the likes of Louis Cordier, Zacharie Astruc, Otto Scholderer, Pierre-Elzéar Bonnier, Jean Aicard, Arthur Boisseau, Antoine Lascoux and so on. And our pity contains an admixture, not exactly of guilt, but of unease: we are the posterity that has consigned them to oblivion. We look at these pictures – at first, anyway ...”

“... hard. The book concludes with a deeply interesting and provocative essay by the Sorbonne historian Pierre Serna entitled ‘Every Revolution Is a War of Independence’. ‘The European continent,’ he writes, ‘can no longer be studied in isolation, as a central place from which would emerge the impetus for action in the New World,’ which is correct. But ...”