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“... 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 ...”

“... Boulez has been the omnipresent conscience of post-war music. He has applied to his own music rigid criteria of method and historical validity, and revised many works again and again, often withdrawing them altogether. He has become a martyr figure somewhat after the fashion of Schoenberg, also self-appointed to a role of revolutionary innovator; the special prize Boulez has paid is not increasing isolation but creative sterility – compositions have flowed ever more slowly from his pen ...”

“... disagreement. I had been to see his A Woman without Love (1951), a version of Maupassant’s novel Pierre et Jean, a truly terrible film by any standards, without a single redeeming or even interesting moment, as far as I could see. In My Last Breath, Buñuel was to say this was ‘no doubt my worst film’, but I didn’t then know that he thought that. A ...”

“... works of literature. He starts in the 20th century with Roberte ce Soir, a very odd novella by Pierre Klossowski which features a host who is so absolute in his hospitality that he swaps places with his guests, while his wife betrays him in a bed above which he has hung a framed text in his own handwriting called ‘The Laws of ...”

“... phrase, ‘bad taste’ (‘mauvais goût’), gives us a clue to what Ernaux has been reading. Pierre Bourdieu’s Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture), written with Jean-Claude Passeron, was published in 1964. It was here he first tried out his argument that educational inequality has ...”

“... made famous by the extraordinary display of anger on the part of Colonel Bob Stewart and Jean-Pierre Thébault, the European Community Monitoring Mission’s Ambassador, when, live on camera, they stumbled across the evidence of a terrible massacre. On the road outside Ahmici, Stewart raged at the impudence of some jumped-up Croat trooper trying to block ...”