“... The books listed below have been my leisure reading for many weeks, and I have a glimmering as to what it is that prompts the converted to claim so much for Gissing. But my own view, which is very commonplace, remains the same: New Grub Street is a novel of extraordinary power, and without it the oeuvre would be no more than the interesting record of a pained but minor artist ...”

“... of a positivist and republican stripe were much taken with multiple personality. Pierre Janet wrote that without the most famous French multiple there would be no chair of psychology at the Collège de France. Janet’s predecessor in the chair, Théodule Ribot, argued that the traditional, conservative neo-Kantian French school of philosophy ...”

“... in a camp commanded by the courtly Erich von Stroheim. One of them, an aristocrat played by Pierre Fresnay, creates a diversion to cover the escape of the other two, played by Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio, working-class and Jewish respectively. It all sounds rather stark and allegorical in description, and Communist viewers in the Thirties were keen to ...”

“... to an apartment in the rue de Cléry, where they were tenants of a picture dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, nephew of the painter Charles Le Brun, remembered now as the rediscoverer of Vermeer. Louise copied some of the Old Masters in his splendid collection, thus becoming ‘indebted to him for the most important lessons I could have learned’. The ...”

“... on the wings enable them to change direction – up, down and sideways. Here is the difficulty. As Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon analyst who played a major role in designing the highly successful F-16 and A-10 warplanes, explained to me, the friction or drag that comes with flying through the atmosphere at extremely high supersonic speeds causes the missile to ...”

“... sashayed over to his wardrobe, and navigated my way across the sea of footwear to his black Pierre Cardin alligator-skin shoes I’d secretly always had my eye on.’) Like so many Soho lives, Bernie’s ended badly, by his own hand, but he was a prize. He would sort anybody out with a drink or out of a spot, and it’s impossible to remember his many ...”

“... movement. In 1977, protesters in ski masks descended on a lunch event she was hosting at the Pierre, disrupting her speech on women’s rights. She recovered quickly, noting that her freedom to give such a speech was a sign of progress. Everyone clapped. How could they not? But the incident led to awkwardness among her artist friends, who began to wonder ...”

“... interest in reality?A more austere, more scholarly version of some of these writings was edited by Pierre Clarac and published under the same title in 1971, and there are English translations of both works: of the first by Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1958, of the second by John Sturrock in 1988. The English titles rather elegantly contradict one ...”

“... cells from baboons (and perhaps other species, too) to amplify the Pasteur Institute vaccines of Pierre Lepine. In Stanleyville, they had the Lindi chimpanzees. This new information does not prove that CHAT vaccine started Aids, but it does significantly strengthen the OPV hypothesis. Over the last three years, various ‘disproofs’ have been put ...”

“... and awards were distributed, only occasionally earning the well-deserved anger of mavericks like Pierre Boulez, who denounced Nabokov and his fellow conspirators with healthy insults about their dishonesty and mediocrity. Saunders estimates that $200 million were spent in the effort, wherever possible, to buy intellectual support for the US, to get critical ...”

“... of that large format camera anyway. His prints – as the exhibition confirms – were poor and Pierre Assouline’s 2001 biography is full of gallery people saying so at the time. The photographer later joked that friends referred to him as a ‘foutugraphe’, given the likelihood that he would screw things up. Although he was given a camera (‘un ...”

“... the tunnel was called Ignace Venetz. His guide in the Val de Bagnes was a chamois hunter, Jean-Pierre Perraudin. Perraudin had long been convinced that the valley had once been filled with ice; it was the only way, he thought, to explain many of the rock formations, and the presence of huge boulders in places where they had no business being. Venetz was ...”

“... to the French court. Friedrich then turned to another French superstar, the mathematician Pierre Maupertuis, who accepted the presidency of a reformed Royal Prussian Academy in 1746. As a long-standing partisan of Newton against Leibniz, and a Frenchman with no intention of learning German, he was well equipped to antagonise the old guard in ...”

“... by the work of the French political anthropologist (described in some quarters as a Nietzschean) Pierre Clastres (1934-77). While Clastres broke to an extent from Lévi-Strauss, his master, and became associated for a time with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he nevertheless remained true to Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork techniques, structuralist ...”

“... to wonder if those archival folders were, in a sense, tricking me. Was the modern state, as in Pierre Bourdieu’s suspicion, creating itself through my reading of it?’ Perhaps that state, with all its modern bureaucratic rationality, existed only on paper, masking a reality rooted in personal relationships and informal practices. Bourdieu’s sudden ...”