“... are linguistically identical? Borges played with that question most famously in his witty story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.’ Common answers would be ‘context’, or ‘the use to which the words are being put’. Derrida says that these differences of meaning are built into the text’s inherent structure of deferrals. The importance of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Vernacular Verse (1990), with its graffiti and cross-stitch mottoes, or Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998). The chapter on ‘The Romantics and Their Contemporaries’ includes a custard advertiser among the latter, opens the Blake headnote with an (apposite) discussion of the Doors, and ends the Burns selection ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... eBay, according to popular legend, was a broken laser pointer. The site’s 28-year-old founder, Pierre Omidyar, got $14 for it in the autumn of 1995 from a collector of broken laser pointers. It’s too good, too iconic a story to pass up: nothing that you own, it implies, is too useless or too broken to be sold on eBay; here is a marketplace so ...”

“... in for the novelist making notes on her tribes. About to attend his first Anglican service, Jean-Pierre Rossignol expects to eat a Sunday lunch ‘with joint’. ‘And after, the sleeping? That is a custom too, I think.’Like other humorists, Pym is not experimental: a first-person narrator rather than a third; a more subtle handling of different points of ...”

“... 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 ...”