“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the west from the inaccurate but fascinating description of the world by the French theologian Pierre d’Ailly, which he covered with marginalia. Along with his taste for reading, Colón inherited vast wealth, and with it he scoured the publishers and bookshops of Europe. A creature of print, he felt at home in busy cities in which new texts constantly ...”

“... argument is based, however, on a more fundamental and challenging idea. From Mauss and Pierre Clastres, he draws the insight that counterpower isn’t just something realised in special circumstances, when self-governing institutions face off against the state, but a ‘dialectical possibility’ in daily life. All societies maintain what, in ...”

“... 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 ...”