“... 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 ...”

“... a spoof praise of historical veracity, which is one of the passages of the Quixote that Borges’s Pierre Menard is known to have attempted with some success. Menard’s version, you will remember, is verbally identical to Cervantes’s; it’s just that the meanings are all different. ‘Historians are to be and must be accurate, truthful and not ...”

“... the collar when the American Robert Paxton produced his pioneering study of the Vichy regime. Pierre Vidal-Nacquet has said that the Jeanson network ‘succeeded’. What did it achieve? Its main activity was carrying money – which is why its members were called ‘les porteurs de valises’. I am not convinced the FLN needed that money. The sums ...”

“... beholder – good. It is a bad thing if one or both of these conditions do not apply. Lucas quotes Pierre-Jean Agier writing in 1789: ‘as far as informing is concerned, silence is a virtue under Despotism; it is a crime, yes indeed, a crime under the rule of Liberty.’ And Félix Lepeletier’s funeral oration for Marat: ‘Denunciation is the mother of ...”

“... man of adultery was like charging an invalid with assault. All this led the French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant to conclude that the Greek body was best seen, not as a lump of meat, temporarily animated by the soul, but as a source of energy and light, a corps éclatant. When the body was at its best, powerful attributes played over its surface like a kind ...”

“... extraordinarily varied, dramatic, ironically layered photographic portraits of herself (taken by Pierre-Louis Pierson), but had to wait until our time to be fully appreciated.Montesquiou was elegantly evasive about his homosexuality, though in the context of the time he could be quite effusively homoerotic without raising many more eyebrows than he did with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... celebrate the anarchic force of madness while voting Liberal Democrat. You can back Tony Blair and Pierre Bourdieu with equal enthusiasm. In the era of Bolshevism, by contrast, theory had at times to hobble hard to keep abreast of what was happening on the streets. The Petersburg Soviet tore up and rewrote Marxist theories of political power, while the ...”

“... and personally directed the project without Congressional oversight. He hired the French architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and marked out the site (just a few miles from Mount Vernon) himself. But building a capital on a muggy tidewater turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined. L’Enfant’s design, inspired rather incongruously by ...”

“... of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.’ It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special ...”

“... That claim can go along with the belief (first seriously advanced in the early 20th century by Pierre Villey, but now almost universally resisted), that Montaigne moved through various phases of philosophical belief, from early Stoicism, to Scepticism, and then to Epicureanism, which licensed a growing interest in his own human quirks. The problem with ...”

“... of Letters saw very few such utterances, even in its early, heroic days, when figures like Pierre Bayle ran real personal risks and published the daring newspaper Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. IIs this contrast overdrawn? The French historian Daniel Roche has spent much of his productive career investigating the principal arena in which the ...”