“... 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 ...”

“... the wire service United Press International, which set him up for a brief sojourn as their man in Pierre, South Dakota (the state capital). He soon returned to Chicago to work for the UPI’s more established rival, the Associated Press. Eager for more than fires and car crashes, he finally made it to AP’s Washington Bureau in the summer of 1965. Lyndon ...”

“... depressed year in Berlin. On her return from Berlin, in 1922, she was briefly in therapy with Pierre Janet, who coined the terms ‘dissociation’ and ‘subconscious’. In her old age, she told Jefferson that Janet touched her breasts at the end of each session. All her life, she professed ‘unqualified scorn for the psychiatric ...”

“... from the limited economic imagination of established centre-right leaders, neatly satirised by Pierre-André Taguieff as ‘Bougisme’ and encapsulated by Norman Tebbit’s injunction to the unemployed to get on their bikes if they wanted to survive in the market economy. Fawcett’s ‘hard right’ is an alliance of these two theoretically incompatible ...”

“... him, only the relatively minor rue Bonaparte. In the great monument to French memory edited by Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, the only essay on him concerns the pathos-laden return of his body to France in 1840. Which is to say that he receives roughly the same space as the abbey of Port-Royal, the Larousse dictionary or the theme of ‘visits to ...”

“... he was merely a dabbler in the sciences. In Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001), Pierre Bourdieu – his most dedicated critic – scolded him for finding ideas more interesting than knowledge; he called Latour a ‘radical constructionist’. More generally, Latour was faulted for being a relativist and, of course, an empiricist; worse, to ...”

“... a so-called Free Zone in the south.Beside the marshal in 1940 stood the grimy, erratic figure of Pierre Laval, a political shapeshifter who had twice been prime minister and who – after starting as a left-winger – was now the voice of the fascist right. Laval was the favourite of the Nazi occupation authorities, and obediently got into a German car that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as an ‘autobiographer of a subject-in-process’. He also befriended the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had collaborated with Godard on Dziga Vertov Group productions such as Wind from the East (1970). Godard remains a touchstone for Crary (Tricks of the Light includes the best essay I know on Histoire(s) du cinéma), and film is a throughline of ...”

“... Jacques-Rose Récamier, while Juliette grew up regarding them both, along with the third man, Pierre Simonard, as her joint fathers. Thus, at the moment when the revolution began, the three young women were already outside the conventions of bourgeois society and at best insecurely connected to the lower ranks of the aristocracy.Clothes had played their ...”

“... Gulf states and west to North Africa. How is this dreadful turn of events to be understood? Jean-Pierre Filiu, who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris after a career in France’s diplomatic corps which included tours of duty in Jordan, Syria and Tunisia, argues in his new book, From Deep State to Islamic State, that the Arab revolutions (as he calls them) have ...”

“... As a popular wartime newsman, he was second only to Ehrenburg. In a way, he was in the position of Pierre at Borodino, whom Tolstoy uses as an innocent observer, whose eye makes the routine horrors of battle strange, and thus even more terrible. Tolstoy himself had been in the same kind of dangerous and yet privileged position at Sevastopol. But for Grossman ...”