“... 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 ...”

“... his own.Then, in September 1949, Stevens took delivery of a still life by the Breton painter Pierre Tal-Coat. Almost immediately he told Paule Vidal, who had arranged the purchase, that he had christened the painting Angel Surrounded by Peasants; and then a few days later he mentions a new poem titled ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’ (the change of ...”

“... freethinking, he goes on in F and other drafts to recount the cases of William Chillingworth and Pierre Bayle, in whom the return from conversion to Rome was a journey towards freethinking; Chillingworth could not free himself from doubts about the Trinity, Bayle’s methodological scepticism made him (like Gibbon) more a historian than a theologian (though ...”

“... argument by one easy increment, for God gave them their freedom, and as the 17th-century sceptic Pierre Bayle comments in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, why would God bestow on mankind a capacity – free will – which he knows in advance man will abuse, even to his eternal doom? Around the biblical writings themselves hovers, of course, the ...”

“... rare. There is no one like that today, unless one considers extraordinary conductors – Pierre Boulez, for example, who is also a great composer – to be virtuoso performers akin to pianists and organists. Today’s concerts are extreme events, something quite apart from everyday life. Pollini or Barenboim or Yo-Yo Ma are individuals with unusual ...”

“... Girondins were more often referred to as ‘Brissotins’, as so many of them were friends of Jean-Pierre Brissot, a deputy, journalist and veteran of liberal causes. Brissot had been around long enough to be compromised; Marat and Desmoulins claimed he had been a police spy before the Revolution. They had been around too, so they knew. They held secret files ...”

“... sometimes accompany him and Satie would entertain them with his knowledge of Parisian history. Pierre-Daniel Templier, his first biographer, painted a charming picture of Satie on the move: ‘When talking he would stop, bend one knee a little, adjust his pince-nez and place his fist on his hip. Then he would take off once more with small, deliberate ...”

“... won the Roger-Nimier Prize in May 1968, it was bestowed on him by Paul Morand, a former adviser to Pierre Laval. Modiano defended his borrowings from anti-Semitic literature as a ‘kind of weapon’ against anti-Semitism, but this critique, it turned out, could also be read as a homage. Modiano’s​ best-known Occupation work is the film Lacombe ...”

“... the neoclassicism of Charlotte Lennox, the novelist and Shakespeare critic who in 1759 translated Pierre Brumoy’s book of versions and commentaries, The Greek Theatre. Or even with Nicholas Udall, who wrote in 1548 of ‘young virgins so nouzled and trained in the studie of letters’ that they could ‘reade or reason … in Greke, Latine, Frenche, or ...”

“... wasn’t the only French writer to experience the conflict as a ‘personal tragedy’: so too did Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a son of Holocaust victims who had helped lead the campaign against torture in Algeria, Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur and Eric Rouleau of Le Monde – to say nothing of Jewish radicals like Rodinson and the Trotskyists Marcel Liebman ...”

“... of genuine humaneness. This faith is loosely modelled on the evolutionary mysticism propounded by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955), and by giving the last word to Father Tassin, who’s loosely modelled on Teilhard, the story ends on a note of post-Catholic optimism. Still, it’s hard not to suspect that hope for the distant future ...”