Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... it doesn’t follow that it’s weaker, or watered down. This was a mistake made by Pierre van den Berghe in The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981), which envisioned nations as concentric circles diluting the physical kinship essence. In fact, such widening ripples may clarify the origins of ‘human nature’. And that can only be because social or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... movement and from the theory of dissociation and ‘fixed ideas’ of Freud’s old rival, Pierre Janet. Indeed, it isn’t Freud but Herman and Janet who distinguish ‘normal memory’, which consists in the ‘action of telling a story’ and in representation, from ‘traumatic memory’, which interrupts (dissociates) the continuity of the ...”

“... of words to transcend social constraints and physical contingencies. This is the belief from which Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the ‘field of cultural production’ tries to gain critical distance: at a particular time and place, he argues, art came to define itself through its contradistinction to economic life. For that reason, the Bourdieu essay ...”

“... Cameroon gained its French-style independence, with many strings attached, on 1 January 1960. As Pierre Messmer, the former French high commissioner, explained, independence was given ‘to those who claimed the least’, after the elimination, ‘politically and militarily, of those who demanded it with the most intransigence’. Ahmadou Ahidjo, the first ...”