“... modelled on Piattoli. He appears only briefly at the start of the novel, as an accessory to Pierre Bezukhov’s awkward introduction to St Petersburg high society. After we learn that this ‘profound thinker’ has been welcomed at the emperor’s court, we hear a snippet of his conversation with Pierre: ‘The ...”

“... lifetime; their play is forgotten, and they become literal or lost. How long can a metaphor live? Pierre Hadot’s absorbing book is written around a single phrase: ‘Nature loves to hide.’ That is a translation, or mistranslation, of a fragment that Heraclitus inscribed some 2500 years ago. It is alive and well. Here is a physicist, Steve Chu, in ...”

“... plunge into contemporaneity: she attributes it to the birth of his first acknowledged child, Pierre. ‘After Pierre was born,’ she writes, ‘he never depicted an adult man wooing an adult woman in a modern setting’ – a typical subject of his earlier paintings. Indeed, from this point, ‘adult men almost ...”

“... of the most distinguished scholars now active in the field of Greek mythology and religion. Jean-Pierre Vernant is a Professor in the Collège de France; his book is a collection of essays published over a long period. Walter Burkert is a Professor at Zurich, and the author of a remarkable history of Greek religion in the Archaic and Classical periods, soon ...”

“... Notre Histoire attempts to consider the many aspects of France’s colonial history. Pierre Singaravélou, a historian at King’s College London and the book’s editor, is in no doubt about the difficulty of his task: ‘France and its former colonies … laid down arms only to continue the war in history books, political forums and the ...”

“... by Belgian missionaries at the end of the 19th century and now crumbling. The priest, Abbé Jean Pierre, stood at the top of the church steps. ‘This is a historic day for Congo,’ he said. ‘This is the day we vote for peace.’ Barely a hundred yards from the polling station, there is a mass grave. Three years ago, dozens of people were killed here in a ...”

“... 1936, 1968 – misrepresented or forgotten? The new liberals, the historians François Furet and Pierre Nora, the politicians Jospin and Hollande, prepared the ground well for the French right. Manuel Valls, currently the Socialist prime minister, declares his admiration for Tony Blair while competing with the Front National’s Marine Le Pen to humiliate ...”

“... In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France – in the very chair occupied today by Pierre Bourdieu – Raymond Aron coined the word ‘sociodicy’: an apt term for the apologetic tendency of much contemporary social science, a tendency which has a long ancestry, going back to the theodicies of the 17th century ...”

“... term; Guy Simoné, a former policeman who was heavily involved in the conspiracy to kill, and Pierre de Varga, a self-proclaimed aristocrat of Hungarian origins who was allegedly the instigator of the whole affair, were also given ten years; Serge Tessèdre, who was accused of recruiting the gunman, received five years, and as he had already spent that ...”

“... of an ancient jetty. But on 12 March 2013, a team of French and Egyptian archaeologists led by Pierre Tallet discovered six fragments of papyrus in a depression near the limestone cliffs five kilometres from the shore. Hundreds of thousands of texts written on papyrus have been discovered in Egypt – ritual and religious instructions for the ...”

“... the Jews than their German masters required them to be, the recollection of how the late Pierre-Mendès-curieusement-surnommé-France was ostracised and the allegations of racialism loudly voiced against the French Communist Party, make an affirmative answer distressingly plausible. Stephen Wilson’s large and learned book, in which he studies the ...”

“... same not being the same, with its attendant implication that the different might not be different. Pierre Menard, a fictitious modern French author, rewrites Don Quixote verbatim, or seems to. In fact, we are told, he doesn’t rewrite it, and he doesn’t copy it. He writes it. That is, he arrives on his own, magically, at precisely the words that Cervantes ...”

“... as the ‘Devil’s stinking martyrs’. Clergymen as diverse as Luther, Erasmus, Rabelais and Pierre de Ronsard explode at what they see in monasteries and convents. For Luther – and for Rabelais, in a book dedicated to a cardinal – the Vatican was stuffed with unbelievers, pretending to follow Christ in order to diddle Christian idiots out of their ...”

“... learn from Williams’s relaxed intimacy with places and things; and he found his own voice in Pierre Reverdy, as surely as Eliot found his in Jules Laforgue:                    My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. The other influences were music (he trained as a concert ...”

“... semiotics and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and ...”