“... 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 ...”

“... Le Mystère Picasso is how Clouzot entitled his famous film, in which the artist was seen at work before our eyes, and for most of its eight decades our century has been vainly trying to decipher that mystery. To talk about Picasso is to talk about the culture of our time, not just because his work has played such an important part in it, but because in the reactions to it we can discern nearly all the myths and clichés of the age ...”

“... state, for they require many more resources than the tools of writer or painter. As the Marxist Pierre Kast put it in 1951, in the second issue of Cahiers du Cinéma,‘the major problem is acquiring the wherewithal, and the restrictions implied by this have absolutely nothing in common with the kind of formal constraints imposed by the fugue, say, or the ...”

“... a labour of love, for his own verse had been influenced by French poets and particularly by Pierre Reverdy, a selection of whose poetry he rendered into English. His translations from the Greek, the Chinese and the Japanese were quite different – a matter of gaining a general sense of the language, of discussing poems with native speakers, of ...”

“... this home truth is being played out today in Canada. The 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms which Pierre Trudeau made his political legacy was widely expected to be as dead a letter as Canada’s earlier constitutional instruments. Instead the Supreme Court has welcomed the hundreds of litigants beating a constitutional path to its door and has established ...”

“... Kafka and Wittgenstein, Sass includes, among others, Baudelaire, Van Gogh, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brissct, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred Jarry, Strindberg, de Chirico, Dali and Beckett. Some aspects of late 20th-century life in the developed world– the distancing effect of technology and bureaucracy on our apprehension of others, the barrage of disparate ...”

“... on themselves) which involved severing nerve fibres, a string of ingenious investigators from Pierre Flourens to Henry Head and Charles Sherrington laid bare the central nervous system’s intricate mechanisms. By 1900, the sensory-motor alterations which, it had long been known, could be effected by severing spinal nerve roots, were being produced by ...”

“... would suggest. One story begins with an ending (‘On the last day of their love, Clara and Pierre Glendinning went for a walk in the countryside’) and one ends with a beginning (‘I think I will be born anew in my mother’s house’). Another is composed entirely of questions, arranged in stanzas and apparently directed at someone who has gone away ...”

“... Schuman, the French foreign minister from 1948 to 1953, proposed in words drafted by Monnet, Pierre Uri and others, that ‘Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organisation open to the participation of the other countries of Europe’. This was only a first step: Europe ...”

“... was it, in 1805, aged 22, to fall in love with and seek to seduce the wife of his older cousin, Pierre Daru, who had enabled him to become part of Napoleon’s administration? But this wild daring did not mean Beyle was never fearful. He was afraid of boredom, of being alone, of being trapped, of not having the price of an opera ticket or a pair of yellow ...”

“... writing – pomposity, jargon, self-indulgence – are avoidable. During his last years Pierre Bourdieu railed against American academic multiculturalism. What struck him was how easily writing about race, gender and empire according to a programmatic idea about ‘multiculturalism’ as the view ‘theoretically’ opposed to racist and colonialist ...”

“... was something he almost could not help, and his favourite male characters, like Stiva Oblonsky or Pierre Bezukhov, or even, in a way, Napoleon, share with Tolstoy this infectious, involuntary solipsism: they cannot help being themselves. It is the same with Tolstoyan comedy: ‘In general we feel about Tolstoy’s humour that he is not concerned with it ...”

“... outfit in collaboration with Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and others and funded by the eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar. (By the time this piece goes to press, the first issue of First Look Media’s first online magazine will be out: it will be something to behold.) One characteristic of targeted incendiary devices, though, is that they don’t have to be very ...”

“... of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life. The dean of Gissing studies, Pierre Coustillas, has for decades provided Gissing materials and support to other scholars, but Delany is the first in more than 25 years to produce a full-scale biography, and the first to engage in an all-out struggle to come to terms with Gissing the ...”

“... I tell John Bird the story of Dudley Moore and me seeing Stravinsky and his wife Vera in the Hotel Pierre in New York in 1963, saying how the name Vera has always seemed to me to humanise Stravinsky. ‘Not so much as Stockhausen,’ says John. ‘His wife’s name was Doris.’ 15 October. Across the river to rehearsal, the crucial scene between Auden and ...”