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“... 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 ...”

“... is formidable. At times, his structural or aerial view can seem reminiscent of the followers of Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault; at other moments, his centuries-wide learning evokes the tradition of Erich Auerbach or Ernst Robert Curtius; and at still other times he takes his place alongside major contemporary scholars of American education and society ...”

“... each other under the dome of the rotunda. Mpane later collaborated with the Belgian artist Jean Pierre Müller on a series of printed veils, now suspended in front of the colonial statuary. The fabrics are translucent, allowing us to glimpse the original offence behind the eloquent reproach. One of the imperial allegories, Belgium Brings Security to the ...”

“... appeared in William’s published writing. In 1890, he published ‘The Hidden Self’, a study of Pierre Janet’s work with hysteric patients, including Marie, who was nineteen years old, the age at which Alice experienced her first major collapse. Alice noted in her diary the paper’s clear psychological acuity – ‘William uses an excellent expression ...”

“... of Algérie française. (‘The texts of Fanon … are frightening in their irresponsibility,’ Pierre Bourdieu told an interviewer. ‘You would have to be a megalomaniac to think you could say just any such nonsense.’) It is no accident, then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s ...”

“... or an old man’s trouser fly, three feet long. As a writer, Bellow sees. He sees the bare toes of Pierre Thaxter ‘pressed together like Smyrna figs’. But what he has seen, in the past, is, if anything, more vivid: at the Division Street Turkish baths, everything remains as it was, and Franush ‘crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the ...”