“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”