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“... from that of another near-contemporary who was also a scientist, theologian and prophet – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. While Teilhard worked in obscurity, wrote copiously but could publish nothing, Barnes sat in the seats of influence, if not of power, at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Temple, Westminster Abbey, the Royal Society and the House of ...”

“... When critics accused Jean-Pierre Melville of shooting his characters as if they were in a gangster movie, he didn’t take the remark as a compliment. ‘Absolutely idiotic,’ he said. He was right in a sense, because the critics were not intending a compliment, but what was he resisting? Melville’s best-known films – Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), Le Cercle rouge (1970), for example – are gangster movies, versions of America converted into sheer style by the transfer to France ...”

“... in Paris. Renoir was there, bald-headed and wearing a mac, and Truffaut and Simone Signoret with Pierre Prévert, the brother of the poet Jacques Prévert, who had written Le Jour se lève and Les Enfants du Paradis. If you were in your twenties and loved the cinema, if you’d spent as much time as I had at the Everyman in Hampstead and the Arts Cinema in ...”

“... and intellectual historians. Its citizens included the great philosopher and dictionary-maker Pierre Bayle as well as his enemy Le Clerc. Its new language of reasoned criticism eventually developed into the polemical medium in which the philosophes of the Enlightenment waged their wars against superstition and l’infâme. The Republic of Letters–as ...”

“... 1533 on the family estate in Périgord, thirty miles east of Bordeaux. His generous-minded father, Pierre, though not himself a man of letters, took pains to provide his heir with an exemplary humanist education, engaging Latin-speaking servants, waking the boy up with music every morning, sending him at the age of six to a humanist boarding school. In his ...”

“... was still much too crude, and it was criticised and refined by a Belgian sociologist, Father Pierre Delooz, in his Sociologie et Canonisations (1969). Since then, a number of historians have tried their hand at the prosopography of the saints. Michael Goodich has attempted to draw ‘a profile of 13th-century sainthood’, André Vauchez has studied the ...”

“... It is difficult to communicate to those too young to remember Pierre Mendès France (‘PMF’) the passionate enthusiasm his name generated. For a whole post-war French generation he was the de Gaulle of the Left: a man of total integrity, a beacon of intelligence and republican principle in the darkest hours. Yet he was prime minister for just 245 days ...”

“... prominent in trying to unite the different Resistance groups: Boris Fourcaud, Yvon Morandat and Pierre Brossolette took important political initiatives towards this end. It is usually believed, however, that it was Jean Moulin who was the real creator of the Conseil National de la Résistance. Recently, while Moulin’s alleged murderer, the Gestapo officer ...”

“... that produced only things – sugar, rum and cigars – that are supposed to be bad for you.) Pierre Salinger – or Pierre Schlesinger as I always want to call him – once told me that he was telephoned by President Kennedy and asked to calculate how many Cuban cigars there were in all of Washington. He replied that ...”

“... Our regimes are democratic,’ Pierre Rosanvallon states in the opening sentence of Good Government, ‘but we are not governed democratically.’ There has in recent decades been a shift, he argues, away from a model of democracy focused on representative assemblies towards one in which executives are dominant ...”

“... poetry, especially of the civilised-barbaric kind, doesn’t know how to do anything but caress. Pierre Joris quotes Celan as saying something similar in relation to ‘euphony’ in poetry, ‘which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors’.The German language, like English, uses words as building blocks, but prefers to do ...”

“... the consternation of its feminist members. The new family policies were steered by figures such as Pierre Laroque, a member of the Conseil d’Etat who was strongly committed to the social reformist tradition of Louis Blanc and Proudhon, and Robert Prigent, a progressive Catholic who had been a member of the Resistance and served as minister of public health ...”

“... work was, in Minois’s words, a ‘collage of texts’, plucked from Spinoza, Gabriel Naudé, Pierre Charron and others, and ‘cobbled together’ (according to Marchand) by ‘those miserable compilers who hardly care what they put in a book … seeking only to astonish fools’ in pursuit of a quick profit. Copies were rare – particularly after the ...”

“... lifetime; their play is forgotten, and they become literal or lost. How long can a metaphor live? Pierre Hadot’s absorbing book is written around a single phrase: ‘Nature loves to hide.’ That is a translation, or mistranslation, of a fragment that Heraclitus inscribed some 2500 years ago. It is alive and well. Here is a physicist, Steve Chu, in ...”

“... of the most distinguished scholars now active in the field of Greek mythology and religion. Jean-Pierre Vernant is a Professor in the Collège de France; his book is a collection of essays published over a long period. Walter Burkert is a Professor at Zurich, and the author of a remarkable history of Greek religion in the Archaic and Classical periods, soon ...”