“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ever occurred at Le Mans on 11 June 1955, three hours into the 24-hour endurance race, when Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes rear-ended Lance Macklin’s Austin-Healey – which had veered into Levegh’s path to avoid Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar, braking for a pit stop – and flew off into the crowd. At least eighty people were killed. The race was not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But Charcot’s formulation contributed relatively little to the moral strand of the story. It was Pierre Janet in 1888, and, still more important, Freud in the following decades, who introduced the idea that trauma was fundamentally a psychic not a physical injury. This injury was sustained either in response to an event or, as Freud would argue after he ...”