“... scholar/writer as a reverse Don Quixote figure, or perhaps a less hands-on version of Borges’s Pierre Menard. Don Quixote tried to live out chivalric romances, but what if he’d become a philologist instead? ‘What if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? … That is the idea behind this book.’ Behind the tricky turns ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Carman’s clients later in his career were household names: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Marco Pierre White and Elton John, Robert Maxwell and Richard Branson. There were also memorable victories against Jonathan Aitken on behalf of the Guardian and Neil Hamilton on behalf of Mohammad Al-Fayed. Aitken sued over various allegations, ranging from a claim ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... exerted themselves to support one another and prop up the family’s status. The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu, along with their own interviews, to demonstrate that a financially secure upbringing can encourage children to take investment risks, knowing that there is a security blanket if things go wrong. Again, we know this already. It seems that few ...”

“... we are perhaps closer to it if we turn to Pascal’s idea that we don’t really live our lives. Pierre Delmas presents the whole sentence as an epigraph to his book Sur les pas de Buzzati: ‘In this way, we never live, we hope to live; and since we are always getting ready to be happy, we undoubtedly never will be.’* The Stronghold and quite a few of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”