“... of the mark. In emphasising Roussel’s importance to Duchamp, Seigel omits any mention of Jean-Pierre Brisset, whom the artist couples with Roussel as an exemplar, describing him as ‘the Douanier Rousseau of philology’. Brisset was no bourgeois but the son of illiterate country folk. He plied many trades and fortuitously acquired modest fame as fou ...”

“... bands, they extended this behaviour to Creation. Their critics, like the waspish French scientist Pierre Duhem, thought this mechanical obsession was a typically British weakness: ‘we thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered abode of reason,’ Duhem complained on opening a textbook by one of Maxwell’s disciples, ‘but we find ourselves ...”

“... that quintessential 19th-century malady, hysteria. On a few occasions they were simply stumped. Pierre de Rudder, a Flemish labourer, broke his leg so badly he spent a year in bed in terrible pain. His doctors found a three-centimetre gap separating the two parts of the unset bone, and counselled amputation. Instead de Rudder went to Lourdes, and was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”