“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gift to us of free will fails to absolve him of cruelty. For, as the 17th-century French sceptic Pierre Bayle devastatingly remarks in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, why would God bestow a gift that he knows in advance will be abused in such a manner as to bring about the ruin of the person to whom it is given? (Our freedom to do evil does not ...”

“... or ‘nativists’, who didn’t believe in it or, perhaps more often, regarded it as undesirable. Pierre Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, saw no reason why the ethos of the Arnoldian public school could not be profitably transported all over the world. Certainly the Games were to be an expression of that ethos. His ideological and Anglophobe ...”

“... attached directly to the Elysée) was the shadowy Guy Penne – and he, like the new DGSE boss, Pierre Marion, Hernu himself, and a number of the other top military and intelligence officials, were all exceptionally devoted Freemasons. Hernu was anyway a soft touch for anything military and had no need of this extra Masonic loyalty to those whose boss he ...”

“... the gangs dressed for history. They were as serious as the America-obsessed Parisian hoods of Jean-Pierre Melville. The style was different, hair instead of hats, but the measured narcissism was equally threatening. One look at the mean three-point handkerchief in Reg’s breast-pocket, a glimpse at the stark geometry of tine-trenches in Ron’s barnet, and ...”

“... can clearly be seen in the Sixties, with the arrival of Pop Art. Warhol followed the example of Pierre Cardin and quickly moved to situate himself as a kind of brand-name or designer label, which could be attached to gallery art, film, rock music, light shows and books, eventually extending the ‘franchise’ to include magazines, Polaroid photographs, TV ...”

“... the International Summer School of Modern Music at Darmstadt and the music he heard there – by Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varèse and the English twelve-tone composer Humphrey Searle, among others – made him feel sick. And while he recognised Coltrane’s improvisational genius, to Shankar’s ears the turbulence of the music opened a voyeuristic window into ...”

“... When eBay launched in prototype three years later it had no complaints procedure: its founder, Pierre Omidyar, would write to both parties asking them to ‘work it out’. This wasn’t a viable long-term strategy: a reliable system of dispute resolution was vital if buyers and sellers were to trust the platform. But many sales involved very small sums of ...”

“... details of its meetings fell into the hands of the French Communist Party, the Prime Minister, Pierre Mendès-France, ordered that its minutes should not be distributed. Thus, no records of its meetings exist in the archives of the Service Historique. At the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, an advisory body, it was suggested that the number of troops in ...”

“... coterie. Everyone knew of him in the rowdy village of the late Apollinaire, [André] Salmon, [Pierre?] Rosenberg etc, holding forth on negro art, Greenlandish metaphysics and the day after tomorrow’s literature – but as to his means, his past, his family, as well look on the moon. Oh charm of Paris! And the indulgence of its natives! A well-cut ...”