“... 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 ...”

“... This is their custom: when they are about to risk their lives, they arrange their hair.’ Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us that the very word kouros is connected with keirō, ‘to cut one’s hair’. The Spartan word for hairdressing was xanthizesthai, meaning ‘glossing or glazing with the brilliance of gold’. In the Iliad, Achilles and his friends cut ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... workers. The closely-related radical school of theorising, which includes Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, engages in the same dubious explanations. With frictionless ingenuity they succeed in demonstrating, at any rate to their own satisfaction, that societies are systematically organised for oppression, even in the absence of identifiable ...”

“... to Misia and she always called him mon petit Ravel. She was even more moved by Debussy. In 1902 Pierre Louÿs invited friends to hear Debussy play Pelléas et Mélisande at an upright piano. As so often happened, Misia was the only woman present. She was there by right, since the composers respected her not just as a Muse but as the ideally-equipped ...”

“... française’, except as a stepping stone to the Elysée. After all, on one side of Algeria, Pierre Mendès France had paved the way for Tunisia’s independence in 1956 while on the other side Edgar Faure had done the same for Morocco. Could one million pieds noirs eternally dominate nine million Algerian Muslims? Could the pretence that Algeria was an ...”

“... at any time, that the akazu was a portmanteau word, a term of convenience, and that her son Jean-Pierre had never been a ‘pal’ of Mitterrand’s son, Jean-Christophe, who was his father’s Africa hand at the Elysée in the 1980s and early 1990s. ‘So much has been invented without ever giving me a fair chance to reply.’ That was the only sentence I ...”

“... their shopping trolleys like coloured ants, robbed of their proper scale. (It has to be said that Pierre Poujade, champion of the small shopkeeper, would have been outraged by this sight.) Wasilla is what inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive and superstitious ...”

“... her Paris friends and acquaintances a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under ...”

“... Entanglements are for les autres. We see here, as in a fever dream, Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï: glacial poise, imperturbable calm – but also something brittle, congealed, mechanical. A ghost in daylight on a crowded street. A set of eyes without a sex. Baudelaire brags of his distaste for the natural, his love of the ...”