“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that in the woods of Bordezac, Gard, a faun subjected her 66 years to prodigious abuses. Or: M. Pierre de Condé was arrested at Craches for rape. Alcide Lenoux, who was also implicated, fled. The two fauns are 16 and 18. Elegant variation shades into ironical euphemism, which shades into dandaical detachment. Flaubert, in despair at the Franco-Prussian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... argument openly indebted to Norbert Elias’s concept of ‘the civilising process’, as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s work on distinction, Franits maintains that the increasing refinement of elite tastes accounts for many of the changes in these paintings. Though historians have often characterised them as the first instances of a genuinely middle-class ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with which, when conducting, he could hear each member of the orchestra anticipated the prodigious Pierre Boulez, a composer-conductor who has similarly failed (so far) to find a suitable opera libretto, and of whom it could probably be said, as the composer-conductor Julius Benedict said of Mendelssohn, that he communicates his conception of a work ‘as if ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... international warrant for his arrest in 2000. Working alongside Gaydamak on Angola were his friend Pierre Falcone, Mitterrand’s son Jean-Christophe, and Jean-Bernard Curial, who advised the French Socialist Party in the 1980s and was an old associate of the Angolan president, José Eduardo dos Santos. Another key figure was Charles Pasqua, who tried to run ...”

“... 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 ...”