“... centuries, such as the defecating duck and the life-sized musicians made by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson. These automata embody the era’s materialist and mechanistic philosophies, inspiring thinkers like Descartes and Leibniz and finding easy coherence with our own robot-building. But how were such machines perceived before the ...”

“... friends the writer (and Protestant) Jean Schlumberger and the novelist and Nobel Prizewinner Roger Martin du Gard, both of whom were bisexual, though less conspicuously so. They accompanied him on his adventures or exchanged letters with him about his encounters with adolescents, and they almost never reproached him. More often, they encouraged him and ...”

“... the yolk; the colossally mouthed Ludovic, capable of singing all four parts of ‘Frère Jacques’ simultaneously; a worm who has been trained to play Hungarian melodies on the zither; the one-legged Lelgoualch, who performs Breton airs on a flute carved out of his own tibia; and the sculptor Fuxier, who creates miniature tableaux within the pulp of ...”

“... saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the Devil’, as Roger Scruton has put it, who ‘after his death was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century’. Reviled both by orthodox Hebraism and many Netherlands Calvinists, Spinoza insisted that intuitive prophecy was the basis of true faith, and that ‘the ...”

“... a painter like myself one place is as good as another,’ he said to the artist Jacques-Émile Blanche in 1920. ‘I tell you there are no subjects pictorial in themselves. It is the painter who makes use of them for his own ends.’In his conversation with Blanche, Sickert went on to say that ‘Dieppe and Venice were convenient to me, that ...”

“... centuries earlier: in 1990, shortly after monetary union, the Sun carried a cut-out picture of Jacques Delors’s face on its front page, suggesting that readers stick it onto their Guy Fawkes effigies before burning them on Bonfire Night. Thatcher seemed to invigorate Britishness as she took it apart. The patterns of industry and employment, which had ...”

“... we hear the words of the Abbé Suger, the first abbot of Saint-Denis, and funeral orations by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet; the score consists of plainsong and passages from Couperin. Maldoror’s ears were as sharp as her eyes: she liked her work to look good and chose her music carefully. None of this struck her as a bourgeois distraction from ...”

“... misgivings about the federal direction of travel that the European Community was taking under Jacques Delors, also articulated her own idea of the Europe to which Britain was proud to belong. It included the states currently under the Soviet yoke. ‘We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European ...”

“... his person were misleading. Monnet is a figure more out of the world of André Mal-raux than of Roger Martin du Gard. The small, dapper Charentais was an international adventurer on a grand scale, juggling finance and politics in a series of spectacular gambles that started with operations in war procurements and bank mergers, and ended with schemes for ...”

“... resurfaced between the wars with a semi-surrealist tint, in the theories of the sacred proposed by Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille at the Collège de Sociologie. In the late 20th century, this intellectual line has seen yet further avatars in the work of two of the most original thinkers of the left, at odds with every surrounding orthodoxy. In the early ...”