“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... leader of the opposition she had had a bad experience at a briefing with the director of the IMF, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, ‘a languid, cigarette-smoking French intellectual of the type she had probably never encountered before’. He condescended to her and treated her like an ignorant housewife. She also got on very badly with Giscard d’Estaing, another ...”

“... system that took her feeling for language as evidence of madness. When she compared herself to Pierre in War and Peace, her doctors thought she was describing a schizophrenic delusion. ‘I inhabited a territory of loneliness,’ she later wrote, ‘which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who ...”

“... Faÿ had offered Stein assurances in 1940, his influence would have diminished significantly when Pierre Laval – who distrusted Faÿ, and tried to have him fired from the library – replaced Pétain as leader of France. After November 1942, Stein had to survive on her own.’ The argument that Malcolm and others have advanced against Stein by association ...”

“... to the referee mode, faulting Lacan for making anonymous use of an anecdote about Derrida’s son Pierre that the philosopher told Lacan at a dinner in Paris a year after the Baltimore conference: ‘Lacan’s role in the affair was not a good one, and Derrida felt wounded. Understandably so.’ She then returns to her therapeutic voice, telling us that Lacan ...”

“... the sail disappear, like Dido. In an essay on Greek perception of space, the French scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that Western culture has always divided space by gender, so that inferiority, inner fixedness, is female: it is summed up by Hestia, goddess of the hearth. Mobility is male, incarnated by Hermes, the lord of messages and roads. This ...”

“... uniform. His International Space Force was supposed to be a global outfit, but ‘Hank’ and ‘Pierre’ had only bit-parts; Sir Hubert called the shots. ‘Eee, I wish I’d stayed in Wigan,’ quavered Digby, as they confronted the green-skinned hordes of Venusopolis. By the mid-Sixties, the fantasy of flying Spitfires to other planets had almost faded ...”

“... them – when he could all but certainly have wrested them from Paris, where the prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, was desperate to quit Indochina after the debacle of Dien Bien Phu.5 Vietnam would have been spared the millions of dead in the American war to prevent what should have occurred more peacefully in the mid-1950s.To this the objection can be ...”

“... the traditional party system in Italy, even had its petty-bourgeois precursor in the movement of Pierre Poujade, whose emergence hastened the final crisis of the Fourth Republic. In all these respects, a French reference could seem to make much sense in the Italian situation of the early 1990s, legitimating hopes of a cathartic purge of the accumulated ills ...”

“... day, an international conference on Indochina opened in Geneva. While the Geneva talks dawdled, Pierre Mendès-France was elected Prime Minister of France, promising a settlement by 20 July. Meeting privately in Berne, Mendès-France told Mao’s Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, that France was anxious to withdraw but wanted to seem to do so ...”

“... in New Left Review last year. Others, including Castañeda and Anderson, rely on it no less.Pierre Kalfon, too, has a good sense of the internationalist dimension to Guevara’s career. For many years a French cultural attaché in Latin America, Kalfon was caught up in the Guevarist enthusiasms of the Sixties. He has now written a rather measured ...”