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“... 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 ...”

“... to death. After Moby-Dick, a novel which, like Hunger, is unique, Melville wrote the unreadable Pierre, which represents a kind of vandalism against the novel. In it, Melville editorialises that great and strange writers can only offer ‘imperfect, unanticipated and disappointing sequels’. This is exactly what Hamsun went on to write. He withdrew from ...”

“... on the forks for a year; then he was taken down and buried, at night, in the cemetery of Saint Pierre de Trinquetaille with the permission of the archbishop of Arles. The forks remained planted in that spot until they fell of their own accord because their bases had rotted.Boysset’s Orchard at the Porte de la RoquetteIn the days when Bertran Boysset was ...”

“... the story of their affair from a secret diary that she had preserved and named, after a poem by Pierre Ronsard, ‘The Life Apart: L’Ame Close’. When Lewis’s biography first appeared in 1975, his detailed account of the affair, together with the reprinting of ‘Beatrice Palmato’, a hitherto unknown fragment of soft porn about father-daughter ...”

“... of the first quality’ has been reattributed to the painter’s assistant Pierre Andrieu. Theodore Reff, in his massive and resplendent edition of the letters, calculates that in the years 1898 and 1899 alone Degas spent 61,000 francs on paintings and drawings. In the same years, he was paying 656 francs per month to rent three floors ...”

“... with the general strike and protesters in Paris. Two years later, in 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made Jusqu’à la victoire, Godard’s first film about the Palestinian cause. I asked Yaqubi why participating in Cannes is important. ‘Controlling the narrative is not just a matter of writing it,’ he said. ‘It’s not about also shying ...”

“... do no harm.) He did not alert the haemophiliac community to this decision. His subordinate, Jean-Pierre Allain, a man who had spent his life treating haemophiliacs, did not go public with his complaints against his boss and neither was willing to take responsibility for the financial consequences of tossing the old product. They asked the minister to mandate ...”

“... is fascinated by codes of behaviour and power relations; I find it hard to imagine Simenon reading Pierre Bourdieu, but if he did he would have found a lot to agree with. Another of Simenon’s unexpected intellectual affinities is with Raymond Queneau, who in the course of his studies spent a lot of time reflecting on the difference between spoken and written ...”

“... areas. He may end up obliterating the Virgin’s face. This is very much the territory of ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, though the ideas can’t be expected to resonate in the clogged ducts of The Recognitions as they do in the vast interior spaces of Borges’s story (which is unlikely to have influenced Gaddis, since it wasn’t ...”