“... 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 ...”

“... Here is an incomplete log of Beatles sightings I kept as 2020 tiptoed hesitantly into 2021: in a Pierre Cardin obituary; in a Gerry Marsden obituary; in a documentary about J.D. Salinger; in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ...”

“... though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows. The French translator and scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown ...”

“... Angeles presumably on the proceeds of her two bestsellers. After the segment we have tea in the Pierre and talk about Leeds, and I walk down the corridor where 40 years ago Dudley Moore and I saw Stravinsky. I avoid downtown and notice how, in the car to the airport, I don’t look back to take in the view of the towers of Manhattan. It’s something I’d ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be attained or even struggled after. Like so much else in life it was bestowed, though not on me. Pierre Loti said ‘I am not my type’ and so it was with me. The predicament, if it is a predicament, is not unusual and those who find themselves in it can console themselves that they are luckier in the long run than those who find their reflection a cause ...”

“... atheistical, and saying how silly it all is, the only productive way is the one the psychologist Pierre Janet recommended, early in the 20th century: first, you must respect the beliefs that underlie the phenomena. Both Gemma and Thérèse believed suffering had an effect that was not limited in time or space. They could, just for a while, share the pain of ...”