“... earlier symptomatically Surrealist titles). As he tells us in his Introduction, his discovery of Pierre-Jean Jouve’s Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin on the quays of Paris in 1937 ‘marked a turning-point in my approach to poetry’; he began to ‘explore other territories than the sub or unconscious, the oneiric and the aleatory’. Psychoanalysed in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It was as though he was almost not really there. ‘Never, when I bade him goodbye,’ writes Pierre Hourcade, who knew Pessoa at the end of his life, ‘did I dare to turn back and look at him; I was afraid I would see him vanish, dissolved in air.’ Always at the point of disappearing from himself, Pessoa clearly had to work quite hard, as a young ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who would map out his future itineraries. They included the logician and rhetorician Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus), who was about to join the other bodies floating down the Seine; but more fruitfully, a French diplomat employed by a German government, Hubert Languet. Escaping from the Parisian charnel house, he passed through ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one carefully cultivated by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel – promising a specific mixture of scientific plausibility, adventure and moral instruction. ‘Jules Verne’ told readers roughly what they would get: a journey, maps, technological marvels, diagrams, rational wonder. A Verne book ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”