“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... generation encountered the greatest teachers of the day: ‘I suppose only Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez were lacking,’ Glock would later reflect. In 1958, he invited Keller to run the chamber music course.With his appointment, in 1959, as controller of music at the BBC, Glock took the modernising project to the centre of cultural power. One of his ...”

“... 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 unison with each other.’ After the French Revolution, doctrinaires like François Guizot and Pierre Royer-Collard, and their student Tocqueville, came to similar conclusions about the counter-revolutionary value of pluralism. And in the Old South, John Calhoun formulated his theory of concurrent majorities – an already fragmented society would be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... indicate that he does. Who? ‘The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! … Um, Hélène Cixous!’ Bayard writes these names down in his notebook, but they’re no more help than what he’s told by Foucault, to whom he pays a visit at the Collège de France. ‘The big baldy’, who seems ...”

“... from a prison cell; he also played with the idea of reconstructing what was already there: his Pierre Menard begins rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and his version turns out to be better than the original. Paul Auster, in the New York Trilogy, follows the logic of detection into dizzy madness. But these clevernesses aren’t just sparked by the ...”

“... Pavolini and Fernando Mezzasoma, officials in the Salò Republic, shot by partisans in April 1945; Pierre Laval and Vidkun Quisling, executed for treason in October 1945; Philippe Henriot, minister of propaganda for the Vichy government, shot by the French Resistance in June 1944. There was a place in Pound’s poem, it seems, for more or less any minor Axis ...”

“... a historical event, the exhumation and enshrinement of the body of the saint in the church of St Pierre in Liège. The saint’s perfectly preserved body, uncoffined in the foreground, is being raised from its grave by a group of robed clerics. They in turn are surrounded by a crowd of well-dressed lay people, and the whole action takes place before an altar ...”

“... draws mostly on an eclectic range of writers – such as Seneca, the Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Martinican cultural theorist Édouard Glissant – to denounce, often eloquently, the moral turpitudes of capitalist productivism.There are nonetheless traces of Mélenchon’s youthful Trotskyism in his millenarian conviction ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with Crispin Kitto’s recipes. But they should beware of supposing (among other things) that Pierre Bouchard et Fils is a Bordeaux merchant, or that the correct way to make a beurre blanc involves three cups of thick cream. After all, this is a work of fiction, isn’t it? Crispin Kitto’s Antarctica may be an innocent fantasy compared with the ...”

“... had appeared which were to dominate evaluations of his thought for years afterwards: those of Pierre Bayle, Jacques Basnage and J.G. Wachter. Bayle debunked some of the hagiography and stressed Spinoza as a noble and systematic atheist, who, contrary to the claims of many theologians, was not corrupted by his disbelief, but was actually more moral than ...”

“... 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 ...”