“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Search for Louis XVII (2002). Marie-Thérèse never saw her brother’s body. He was visited by Dr Pierre Joseph Desault on 6 May 1795, who reported that he had ‘encountered a child who is mad, dying, a victim of the most abject misery and of the greatest abandonment, a being that has been brutalised by the cruellest of treatments and whom it is impossible ...”

“... on the order of moral correction or readjustment; they open up a new vein of sympathy, as when Pierre Bezukhov visits Dolokhov at home, and discovers that the rowdy man-about-town with whom he has just fought a duel is a ‘most affectionate’ son to his old mother and hunchbacked sister. McEwan’s estrangements are, more often than not, visual ...”

“... time of the purges after the Liberation. Ordinarily opposed to the death penalty, he agreed that Pierre Pucheu, minister of the interior in the Vichy government, should be executed. ‘Too many men have died whom we loved and respected,’ he wrote in Les Lettres françaises, ‘even for those of us in the midst of this battle who would otherwise wish to ...”

“... up by wild boars. This is from a later poem in Atemwende (1967); the English translation is by Pierre Joris. WEGE IM SCHATTEN-GEBRÄCH deiner Hand. Aus der Vier-Finger-Furche wühl ich mir den versteinerten Segen PATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK of your hand. From the four-finger-furrow I root up the petrified blessing. If not the whole boar, at least his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an 18-year-old student of Cage’s, and by Morton Feldman, Cage’s friend; and thundered through Pierre Boulez’s fiendishly difficult first sonata. The penultimate piece on the programme was Cage’s latest, 4’33”. Tudor shut the piano and sat still. The wind rustled in the maples. Half a minute later he reopened the lid, then shut it. The summer rain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... epistème’ into an art review – on instances of ‘pretentious bollocks’. After discovering Pierre Bourdieu, I even began to wonder if a taste for difficult, academically consecrated writers was as big a leap away from the status-prizing values of an expensive education and South-Eastern English background as I’d supposed. Over the years that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault presented a novel way of navigating the archive. ‘Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère – un cas de parricide au 19ème siècle présenté par Michel Foucault’ drew attention to an obscure, local melodrama. Rivière, after murdering his mother and siblings in a Normandy village in ...”

“... 20 abstentions. Its true nature was no secret. ‘Parliamentary democracy has lost the war,’ Pierre Laval, Pétain’s prime minister, declared in July 1940. ‘It must disappear and give way to an authoritarian, hierarchical, national and social regime.’ Wieviorka deals with this uncomfortable fact by ascribing the vote to ‘panic’ and to a belief ...”