“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ambassador to Vienna, who had written a guidebook to Sicily, and the ‘libertine pornographer’ Pierre François Hugues, who styled himself baron d’Hancarville. At considerable risk to their lives, the four men descended into the crater, where it was so hot that they decided to take their clothes off and eat their picnic in the nude.The Marquis de Sade ...”

“... Bank and discouraged from swanning around the Golan Heights with Labor Party dignitaries. Jean-Pierre Filiu, the author of Mitterrand et la Palestine (2005), recalls that in 1980, when Rocard stood as a rival for the PS presidential nomination, the Mitterrand faction began a whispering campaign against him based on his pro-Palestinian position. For Rocard ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of states to secure the peaceful unity of the continent, as proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in France. The first became canonical in the diplomatic chancelleries of the time. The second inspired philosophers like Rousseau and Kant, in whose writings the term ‘perpetual peace’, hitherto indicating only the non-repetition of a particular ...”

“... path broken by Warburg: to embed the work in a social as well as an intellectual landscape. Pierre Francastel, for example, connected Primavera’s dancing Graces and striding nymph to the elegant public festivals and balls with which costumed Florentines welcomed the first day of May, celebrated princely marriages, and forwarded requests for dates ...”

“... of the Revolution as fully as the enemies they use it against. Both books betray the influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s auto-referential analysis of the intellectual career as a struggle of every instant for self-promotion; only they lack the richness of Bourdieu’s analyses, which (very much indebted to Sartre, be it added) are able to use the punctual ...”

“... position in the overseas province by leftists (Guy Mollet/Harold Wilson) or weak-minded centrists (Pierre Pflimlin/Edward Heath), the military must ensure that the right sort of government came to power in the metropole. Operation Clockwork Orange was precisely this: an attempt to smear and undermine Labour leaders and Tory wets alike, the short-term aim being ...”

“... to Sartre. They give a detailed and cheerful account of her seduction of Sartre’s pupil, Pierre Bost. Repeated almost verbatim as the romance of Françoise and Gerbert in her first novel L’Invitée (She came to stay), the story clearly demonstrates the autobiographical sources of her early fiction. What has scandalised the French are the ...”

“... are linguistically identical? Borges played with that question most famously in his witty story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.’ Common answers would be ‘context’, or ‘the use to which the words are being put’. Derrida says that these differences of meaning are built into the text’s inherent structure of deferrals. The importance of ...”

“... of Vernacular Verse (1990), with its graffiti and cross-stitch mottoes, or Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998). The chapter on ‘The Romantics and Their Contemporaries’ includes a custard advertiser among the latter, opens the Blake headnote with an (apposite) discussion of the Doors, and ends the Burns selection ...”

“... move had been against the rules, but he added that he was not complaining. Can one imagine Jean-Pierre Rives saying this, or the reaction of the population of Toulouse were he ever to say it? A constant political ploy is to complain if there is a sector where French sport is doing badly. The Communists have recently demanded to know why France is doing so ...”

“... his mouth, absorbed, looking almost stupid’, and that once, when he was six, ‘a servant called Pierre, amusing himself with Gustave’s innocence, told the boy when he pestered him: “Run to the kitchen ... and see if I’m there” ’ – which the child duly did. Not much, is it? Yet Sartre immediately applies the magnifying glass and expands the child ...”