“... 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 ...”

“... both Jacques Chaban-Delmas and his successor Alain Juppé became prime minister. Likewise, Pierre Mauroy from Lille. Raymond Barre, prime minister under Giscard, subsequently became mayor of Lyon. So too today, the prime minister under Hollande is Jean-Marc Ayrault, the long-time mayor of Nantes (and head of the Socialist delegation in the National ...”

“... marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies. The anthropologist Pierre Clastres argued that the Yanomamo and Siriono, two of Diamond’s prime examples, were originally sedentary cultivators who turned to foraging in order to escape the forced labour and disease associated with Spanish settlements. Like almost all the groups ...”

“... income or – especially – location). Tastes correlate with all those other variables – as Pierre Bourdieu never tired of showing – but their correlation is less than perfect: otherwise critics could never convince us of anything we don’t already believe. Social networks can be one more means of convincing. They are thus part of the larger story of ...”

“... with her son. In the late 1960s, she fell in love with Nicole Stéphane, who had acted in Jean-Pierre Melville’s films but now produced her own. Stéphane, who was descended from the Rothschilds, set Sontag up in an even posher part of the 16th than where Bouvier had stayed with the countess, and Sontag began to work on film and theatre projects, even ...”

“... to home for easy consumption: the best known novelist then writing that sort of thing in France, Pierre Loti, was dismissed by Segalen as a ‘pimp of the exotic’. It’s this more than anything that has brought Segalen back into view, as a writer of obvious significance for the post-colonialist critics whose war-chants are currently rising into the sky ...”

“... had its disastrous French premiere – a scandal of choral under-rehearsal for which blame fell on Pierre Boulez. Craft is convinced that Walsh has cribbed his own Stravinsky writings: more than 25,000 words by his calculation, though that must include the deleted quotations from the conversation books. He berates Walsh for putting too much matter into the ...”

“... often – behind the lines, as victors avenged themselves on helpless civilians. Victor Serge and Pierre Herbart evoke devious communist manoeuvres to destroy ideological opponents in the middle of a desperate war of survival. And Jordi Soler, born a quarter-century after the Civil War ended, writes about the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer, part of France’s foul ...”

“... Hugo’s strategy for publishing Les Misérables; this involved dumping his regular publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, insisting on an enormous 300,000 francs for an eight-year licence (around £3 million today, Bellos calculates), then orchestrating a huge book launch with more or less simultaneous publication in various countries, an equally huge publicity ...”

“... in the Chinese Bible, suggesting typists might prioritise by frequency. His contemporary Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier, working off the Dao de jing, pioneered the technique of typing by recombinatory radicals. He was careful never to splinter a character mid-stroke – to break, as Mullaney tenderly puts it, its bones. These findings would lay the ...”

“... Egyptians might think otherwise. The director of the Antiquities Service – still a Frenchman, Pierre Lacau – considered the tomb of such significance that, under the terms of the excavation permit, the finds should stay in Egypt, though the final decision took several years (contra Wilkinson). In 1930, the Egyptian government paid Carnarvon’s widow ...”

“... was much civic advancement for Jews, in administration, politics and the military. The historian Pierre Birnbaum has calculated that there were 25 Jewish generals, 34 Jewish judges and 42 Jewish prefects in the period to 1945. De Waal quotes Philo of Alexandria to the effect that Jews considered their ‘real fatherland’ to be the country they ...”

“... telegraphing your intentions. (In war-torn Algeria, as Cole was mastering his trade, the young Pierre Bourdieu was taking hundreds of pictures for his research files with a Zeiss Ikoflex, often ‘without anybody noticing’.) But we know, too, that Cole had his hands on a Nikon rangefinder when he shot most of the material for House of Bondage in the ...”

“... transformed. ‘Zorg, Author of the Quixote’ is about a character who is not Borges’s Pierre Menard only by virtue of being a six-tentacled alien. The ‘Bartleby’ who appears in ‘Consolidation of Spirits’ isn’t Melville’s Bartleby either, since he’s a remarkably hard worker who tirelessly catalogues the misdeeds of poltergeists.I’m ...”