“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... artists such as Kutlug Ataman, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen and Yinka Shonibare; while Pierre Huyghe, Annette Messager and others are Paris-based. Germany was represented by a number of established artists, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hanne Darboven, Maria Eichhorn and Dieter Roth.They were clearly outnumbered, however, by artists from faraway ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... While the Surrealists’ involvement in psychoanalysis was derided by the Communist Party, for Pierre Yoyotte, another Martinican writer, it was key to the ‘anti-fascist significance’ of the movement. As early as 1934 he argued that communism had failed to exploit the ‘political importance of collective emotions’ as adroitly as fascism had: ‘The ...”

“... and what Tannhäuser had felt while musing on Venusberg.’ These recollections were confided to Pierre Janet, the psychiatrist who wrote up Roussel’s case in From Anxiety to Ecstasy (1926), a volume on religious manias. Janet chose for his patient the pseudonym ‘Martial’, the first name of the central figure in Roussel’s novel Locus Solus, published ...”

“... and meaning itself – was no longer new. Like the total serialism championed by his contemporary Pierre Boulez, it seemed all the more dated for heralding a future that had failed to arrive. In the US, where he’d once enjoyed a cultish notoriety alongside Beckett and Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... could arise with Bray’s ‘brothers’ had already been revealed by the publication in 1994 of Pierre Chaplais’s studies on Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother, not least the problem of knowing of their existence. For instead of a ‘covenant of brotherhood’ between Edward and Piers, the first modern editor of the Cottonian chronicle had ...”

“... lost on him. In the months after his father’s death he wrote one of his great serious spoofs, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, a meditation, using a straight face and no ‘fine writing or purple patches’, on the idea of rewriting as an inspired enterprise, and on the concept of the writer as a force of culture imprisoned by language and time to ...”

“... outstanding talents in the European avant-garde, one above all was hailed with religious fervour: Pierre Boulez. There is some truth in Klaus Geitel’s recent observation that no French musician since the time of Lully has exerted as much power and influence as Boulez has. Both directly and indirectly, his is as much a musico-political and hence an economic ...”

“... earlier symptomatically Surrealist titles). As he tells us in his Introduction, his discovery of Pierre-Jean Jouve’s Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin on the quays of Paris in 1937 ‘marked a turning-point in my approach to poetry’; he began to ‘explore other territories than the sub or unconscious, the oneiric and the aleatory’. Psychoanalysed in ...”

“... It was as though he was almost not really there. ‘Never, when I bade him goodbye,’ writes Pierre Hourcade, who knew Pessoa at the end of his life, ‘did I dare to turn back and look at him; I was afraid I would see him vanish, dissolved in air.’ Always at the point of disappearing from himself, Pessoa clearly had to work quite hard, as a young ...”