“... 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 ...”

“... again. But the Moonies’ closest and most intriguing links are with Le Pen’s Front National. Pierre Ceyrac, nephew of the former head of the French employers’ organisation and one of the most prominent Moonies in France, was accorded a leading place on the FN list in the 1986 elections. But, according to Boyer, the most striking example of a Moonie in ...”

“... problem for liberal democracy were its enemies,’ Moyn wrote in 2006, introducing a collection of Pierre Rosanvallon’s writings, ‘as if there were no need to ponder the historical variations and untried possibilities of democracy.’ Twelve years later, Trump has inadvertently forced open political and economic possibilities across the ideological ...”

“... The souverainiste current also has a counterpart on the left – represented at first by Jean-Pierre Chevènement and for the last decade by Mélenchon. The lines between right and left sovereigntism are fluid, an ambiguity Zemmour has exploited adroitly, cultivating friendly relations with Mélenchon and other figures on the left in a way that would be ...”

“... of English spleen, wears clothes from London, eats Strasbourg pie and reads Gibbon, Rousseau and Pierre Bayle. Even his day is timed by a foreigner – ‘Bréguet’s unsleeping chime’. In the country, he meets Lensky, a striving poet and recent graduate of the University of Göttingen, still full of Schiller and Goethe. Lensky is in love with Olga, a ...”

“... all biographers, Scurr hopes to give her subject a private life. She possibly makes too much of Pierre Villiers, a man who claimed, much later, that he was Robespierre’s unpaid secretary in 1790. He is the only witness who tells us Robespierre had a love affair. Scurr knows Villiers is a suspect source, but can hardly resist him. (It’s as if you can’t ...”

“... is already adequately nourished by any one of our ‘real life’ days. In 1992, he met Marie-Pierre Gauthier, whom he would marry in 1998. She worked in publishing and became, effectively, his unpaid literary agent: submitting his first novel to scores of publishers, until it was eventually taken on by Editions Maurice Nadeau and became a cult ...”

“... to the edges of cultural memory. The first comprehensive biography was written in French by Pierre Legouis and published in an edition of 500 copies in 1928. It appeared in English, abridged and lacking its rich footnotes, in 1965. Despite the enormous amount of critical commentary on the poems, a lot of it tedious and exasperating, no major biography ...”

“... The struggle lasted two years; it was sharpened by a short-lived rebellion (1963-64) led by Pierre Mulele, prompted by Mobutu’s seizure of power in the country as a whole: ‘indigenous’ Congolese in Kivu then rallied to the Mulelists, while the Banyarwanda did what nervous immigrants tend to do, sheltering under the wing of the host country’s ...”

“... excavation, written outside the critical mainstream and almost out of the blue, by the Frenchman Pierre Legouis. He translated it into English only in 1965, and then in a heavily abbreviated edition. He did not have to change his facts much, for little had been discovered about Marvell’s life in the interim, though the movement to contextualise his writing ...”

“... The Relapse. Other repertory roles included Wildair in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple, Pierre in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and Fondlewife in Congreve’s The Old Bachelor, but it was always the consensus that Foote’s peculiar talents really only shone in parts he had written for himself. The first of his own productions was Diversions of the ...”

“... Patassé, was in fact the junior partner in a coalition with the Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, because Bemba had more money. In any marketplace, flows of information drive the bargaining. Until the telecoms revolution, and especially the advent of the Thuraya satellite phone, negotiations had to be conducted face to face and in ...”

“... ou Barbarie project with Cornelius Castoriadis, under the pseudonyms ‘Claude Montal’ and ‘Pierre Chaulieu’ respectively, after both had left the Trotskyist Fourth International. For Lefort in L’Invention démocratique: les limites de la domination totalitaire, totalitarianism wills an unattainable oneness as its end: it folds polity and society ...”

“... Sancho Panza fancied himself a wine connoisseur of rare ability. Challenged on his claim to have a ‘great natural instinct in judging wines’, he assured a sceptic that you ‘have only to let me smell one and I can tell positively its country, its kind, its flavour and soundness, the changes it will undergo and everything that appertains to a wine ...”

“... wrote a memorable piece about national intelligence agencies, and the following year, a homage to Pierre Mendès France, one of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a hundred pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the ...”