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“... 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 ...”

“... reputation as a forum for advanced musical debate, and it was here that Messiaen first got to know Pierre Boulez and Yvonne Loriod. Boulez has remained a committed partisan to this day, despite his disapproval of certain aspects of Messiaen’s music.Loriod’s technical ability was such that Messiaen found it quite impossible to think up anything she ...”

“... once served in the army. The day after the Statut des Juifs was passed, the Jewish former Deputy Pierre Massé, interned at Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz, wrote to Pétain: I would be obliged if you would tell me if I must remove the stripes from my brother, sub-lieutenant of the 36th Infantry Regiment, killed at Douaumont in April 1916; from my ...”

“... and soon outpaced, by a partner in the liberal centre. Le Débat, launched in a sleeker format by Pierre Nora under the auspices of Gallimard, had a more ambitious agenda. Nora opened the journal with a programme for intellectual reform. In the past, French culture, steeped in humanist traditions, had been dominated by an ideal of rhetoric that had led from ...”

“... head of Crédit Agricole, one of the world’s biggest banks, while the President’s niece, Marie-Pierre Laudry, was nominated to the Ombudsman’s office. Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, has also benefited: her brother, Roger Gouze, has been appointed to a succession of state ‘advisory’ jobs despite being in his late seventies, while the film company ...”

“... prison memoir. At one stage in his long imprisonment, Valladares enjoyed conversations with Pierre Golendorf, a disillusioned French Marxist spending some time in jail for writing imprudent letters home: ‘It’s true, Valladares, most of the European Left is very pro-Castro, and it seems to them acceptable that certain reprehensible acts occur. They ...”

“... a dead-end. In 1917 came the storm in a wine-glass known as ‘l’affaire Rivera’. The poet Pierre Reverdy was conducting a curious rearguard campaign in Nord-Sud against deviations from analytical Cubism, with special attention to Rivera, whose ‘Cubist portraits’ he considered an oxymoron. Max Jacob gives a gloating account of a late-night reunion ...”