“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”