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“... they were. It is not clear how she replied. Just as telling was Chanel’s relationship with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, the Jewish businessmen who marketed her perfume. This was the defining relationship of her business life. It was the perfume business that gave those interlocking Chanel Cs their global fame, and the Wertheimers were largely ...”

“... of the local ‘field of power’, as he would describe it, that is Parisian intellectual life. Pierre Bourdieu’s first book, his 1958 ethnography of the Kabyle of Algeria, was, it’s true, social anthropology done in the British manner: it talked of the social functions of ‘solidarity’. But even as he finished it, Bourdieu was being drawn to the ...”

“... France, spectacular anti-Semitic violence coexisted with remarkable successes for French Jewry. As Pierre Birnbaum writes in the introduction to his new book, part of a series called ‘Jewish Lives’, France ‘is virtually the only country in the world, apart from Israel, that has several times chosen as its leader a Jew openly proclaiming his ...”

“... in the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Mascarene islands. Functionaries like Pierre Poivre in Mauritius and Alexander Anderson in Saint Vincent combined Enlightenment ideas about agronomy and plant chemistry with a proto-Romantic appreciation of nature, and, above all, a sensitivity to the impact of capitalist agriculture on tropical ...”

“... by Painlevé.) Among composers, he knew the Futurist Luigi Russolo, Edgar Varèse and later Pierre Henry, whose music he used to score The Love Life of the Octopus in 1965. The pile-up of names is important, because Painlevé seems to have learned from all of them. His films are obsessionally focused on minute anatomy, but aesthetically they invoke ...”

“... East African state, which neighbours Rwanda, has been under investigation since its president, Pierre Nkurunziza, imposed a reign of terror in order to secure a third term in office, which he was constitutionally barred from seeking. The Gambia, a microstate of two million inhabitants bounded by Senegal, had even less international prestige than ...”

“... over this? How could a film in this vein, namely L’Enfant, written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year? To say nothing of the same prize won by their film Rosetta, a venture in just the same vein, in 1999. ‘A gritty urban tale of a young couple living on the breadline in France’, the BBC says of ...”

“... A recent French documentary about Pierre Bourdieu is entitled, after one of his own pronouncements: La Sociologie est un sport de combat. When he died in January 2002, Bourdieu was widely considered France’s leading sociologist, its most influential intellectual – and one of its angriest men. In an autobiographical fragment published within days of his death (now available as a book, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse*), he recalled the ‘stubborn rage’ engendered in him by his experience of boarding-school and the mockery he suffered there, in part for his rural accent and origins, in part for being a ‘bon élève’ who clearly aspired to rise above his fellow pupils ...”

“... died, leaving Lake Onondaga so polluted with calcium carbonate and mercury that it would take, Pierre Laszlo reports, an estimated $600 million to clean up. Of all the iniquities associated with humanity’s need for salt and greed for money, and many more are discussed in these nuggetty books, the French salt tax, the gabelle – not completely done away ...”

“... especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experiences of his life,’ writes Pierre Joris in a biographical note. Celan himself did forced labour. When the Russians retook the Bukovina, he went back to Czernowitz. In 1945, having anagrammatised himself to Paul Celan, he was in Bucharest, where an early version of his most celebrated ...”

“... both laid claim to aristocratic and colonial distinction. As Melville noted sardonically in Pierre, ‘the great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in America’ bore comparison with any European model. The Gansevoorts, as their name suggests, were Dutch settlers, who had come to New Amsterdam in the 17th century, and were connected ...”

“... later learned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another was Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now defunct Gauche prolétarienne, who had become a deeply religious and, I supposed, Orthodox Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal’s assistants that he was an Egyptian ...”

“... also freelance recruits to nascent movements of resistance, soon to provide local leadership: Jean-Pierre Lévy in the Isère, Pierre Kaan in the Allier, Jean-Pierre Bloch in Dordogne, Marc Bloch – the historian, who was to be denounced and executed – come to mind. The Jewish 35th ...”

“... of the riots that hastened Abolition in Martinique, of the annihilation of the old capital Saint-Pierre by a volcanic eruption in 1902, of the tendrils of a ‘Creole’ black consciousness growing out of a half-consummated liberation, are derived from the life and sayings of her father, Esternome; half-remembered words which she has cobbled together into ...”

“... said of the anthropologist (Claude Lévi-Strauss), the historian (Georges Duby), the sociologist (Pierre Bourdieu), not to mention the scientist (Jean-Pierre Changeux) or even the poet (Yves Bonnefoy). Today, the Collège de France is the stuff intellectual dreams are made of. Academia has displaced literature as the home ...”