“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1780s he was still in Paris, ‘poor and living miserably’, according to his then friend Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and suffering gravely from a skin condition that would afflict him until his death.Marat’s frustrated ambition might help to explain his later radicalism. Other revolutionaries drew on similar memories of being marginalised and humiliated by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”