“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Most important, the massacre of Algerians in October 1961 occurred in the centre of Paris, and Pierre Messmer, de Gaulle’s Minister for the Army, pointed out that, if it was to be considered a criminal act, the crime was one that implicated every member of the Government, ‘from the humblest secretary of state to the President’. In his ...”

“... As the introduction to this new translation points out, it was only with the triumphant work of Pierre Simon Laplace, more than a century later, that the tasks set by the ‘Principia of legend’ were finally accomplished. Though published in other European languages, within Britain the founding text of the nation’s mathematical physics was digested in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... convincing, living interpretation.One of the most persistent critics of the authenticity drive was Pierre Boulez. ‘What is authenticity anyway?’ he wrote in 1988.The more we tire ourselves out searching for it, the more it escapes us. Minds that have not experienced the era of the works that are being reconstituted cannot possibly know their reality and ...”