“... the organic life of the music, the veins and the tissues of the music.’ On the other hand, for Pierre Boulez it is precisely the organic nature of Wagner’s development of the motifs in the Ring which is a source of admiration and respect. On this, I’m with Boulez. Rather than treating the leitmotifs as a handy glossary, where we can look up meanings ...”

“... with which Israel rushed to conquer and colonise the West Bank soon troubled Jewish liberals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean Daniel, the editor of the Nouvel Observateur, but Lanzmann’s attachment to Israel only grew fiercer. After the Six-Day War, Lanzmann returned to Israel. He spent time with troops on the border with Egypt during the War of ...”

“... in the habit of dropping by in search of the son who had deserted her. And he hated going to the Pierre Hotel, where Perspectives was based: ‘The elevator boys seem to think that I am an agent of the Mafia, bringing opium to the real patrons.’He was dependent by this stage on alcohol and sleeping pills but also amphetamines. His journals record the ...”

“... on the coast in the summer of 1886, assembling a large caravan and clearing it for departure. Pierre Labatut, his original partner in the enterprise, fell ill in June – and later died – and when Rimbaud found another, he, too, was obliging enough to drop dead in September. Rimbaud set out for Shoa in October, where he met with a series of bitter ...”

“... in the European art world, fêted by museum curators. He usually worked through the auction house Pierre Bergé, but Nedjemankh was a direct sale. Over the course of the summer, as Patch deliberated over the purchase, the dealers behaved furtively, asking Patch to handle their exchanges ‘confidentially’. She did not appear to find this odd. In emails she ...”

“... situation I’ve ever had to cope with. I can’t see the way out.’ We would need Borges’s Pierre Menard to tell us how long it took Lowell to make up these four lines. Perhaps as long as it took him to copy them out, or perhaps not even as long as that. Because Bishop’s letter, written in February 1970, included the lines more or less ...”

“... on the same form, precisely thanks to postmodernism. That’s the idea behind Borges’s story of Pierre Menard, a French Symbolist who is led by his Symbolist background to produce a text identical to Don Quixote. Borges’s story, however, relies on our historical knowledge of Cervantes’s existence. The incredibly funny, thought-provoking claim that ...”

“... or at the very least the presence of war at the heart of childbirth.’2 Could it be, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests to Loraux in conversation, that ‘giving birth is the most accomplished test of a woman’s virility?’ In which case, the act that is seen as supremely defining of a woman, as the acme of femininity, is also the moment when she leaves ...”

“... of your life, the spectrum on which you, as an individual, are plotted from cradle to grave. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon explained, you must be ‘noted, registered, enumerated, accounted for, stamped, measured, classified, audited, patented, licensed, authorised, endorsed, reprimanded, prevented, reformed, rectified and corrected, in every operation, every ...”

“... it as ‘geography, pure space, open to human action’. In the words of the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, ‘America is the sublime and the abominable.’Critics of American racism, class inequality and foreign policy have tended to focus on the abominable. ‘Two centuries ago,’ Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961, ‘a former European colony decided to ...”

“... they were known in the world at large, came to the Faculty in São Paulo: Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialised in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um ...”

“... to the century in which narrative was bent into new shapes – by Alfred Jarry, Robert Desnos, Pierre Reverdy, Henri Michaux, Max Jacob and others. All of them shared the conviction that poetry no longer held a monopoly on compression, and that narrative could be used for purposes other than telling a story. As George Balanchine said, when told his ballets ...”

“... of impatience, which is the reason it was easy to dismiss it, as Macron did, as a reincarnation of Pierre Poujade’s petty bourgeois tax revolt in the 1950s. But as the protest gathered pace and ambition, the comparison began to look threadbare. Long before the gilets jaunes started blocking roundabouts and motorway tolls the geographer Christophe Guilluy was ...”

“... call Great Expectations, in which she would plagiarise, among others, Dickens, Propertius and Pierre Guyotat’s monstrously abject and disjointed Algerian War memoirs. Running through the middle, as Kraus says, was a stream of grotesquely skewed autobiography: ‘the threat and promise of inheritance … like the River Styx’.It was a bit from Great ...”

“... as by its early political unity. This is in effect the ease made by another Annales historian, Pierre Chaunu, who likes to dwell on the singularity of the French ‘super-state’, by the age of the Renaissance four times the size and population of the only comparable unified monarchy, its English rival. Braudel himself seems to concede as much when he ...”