“... interesting approaches in contemporary French sociology, the cultural analysis associated with Pierre Bourdieu, Marin’s colleague at the Hautes Etudes and editor of the series in which his book appears. These studies of Louis XIV, one in the style of Althusser, the other in the style of Bourdieu, raise two serious questions, which deserve further ...”

“... and agonising over delinquent tendencies. At the end of War and Peace, Natasha rushes out to show Pierre the colour of the stains on their baby’s nappy. The drive of the book has been against a current of free, dangerous sexuality and into the harbour of domestic life: what more could anyone wish for Pierre, for ...”

“... whodunnit, it’s just that it’s set in a hyper-real world.’ The same could be said of Pierre Bayard’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (Fourth Estate, £10), which first appeared in France a couple of years ago, to be greeted by Le Monde as ‘the most exciting mystery story of the year’ and ‘a clever investigation into the art of reading’, based ...”

“... Soviet Union. By 1949, however, the disaster apparently threatening Europe had been averted. For Pierre Lignes, a municipal worker who rented out deckchairs on the Champs-Elysées, the explanation was simple. ‘Without Marshall aid probably very few people would be sitting down,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Most of them would be rioting and bashing each ...”

“... resonant name. To all such ‘scholars … would-be scholars … mythomaniacs and charlatans’ Pierre Vidal-Naquet had one answer, the same answer for half a century: Plato made Atlantis up. That was his response to a lecture by Fernand Robert in 1956, when the speaker tentatively referred to the theory that Atlantis was inspired by the lost Minoan ...”

“... constructed he has been followed more recently by, among others, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Mary Douglas. To these we must now add Fragments for a History of the Human Body, a collection edited by Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. The book is in three volumes, containing in all 48 essays, many of a remarkably high ...”

“... Blessed Stanislas Kostka was commissioned in 1702 by the Jesuits in Rome from the French sculptor Pierre Legros to promote the veneration of a pious Polish novice. He is represented lying on his deathbed wearing a robe of black Belgian marble. His face, hands and pillows are of white Carrara marble, the mattress is yellow marble and the cover below banded ...”

“... reports on Confucian cosmology began reinforcing Enlightened deism in the lifetimes of Spinoza and Pierre Bayle – and a Unesco ‘world history’ of ‘political thought’ would have to consist of several volumes (how many?) designed to be read concurrently. Within the Latin ecumene, the problem of selection does not disappear. Professor Burns indicates ...”

“... clearly in peril and ‘Americanisation’ became a verb before it had time to become a reality. Pierre Larousse defined américanisme, Edmond de Goncourt deplored the Americanisation of France. Before typewriters, telephones and tin lizzies, mankind (meaning the French) was sliding down the honeyed slopes of philistinism and technical materialism. Before ...”

“... Jacob, just off the Rue Bonaparte and St Germain des Près. Both live in the essential Left Bank. Pierre Mendès-France, the legendary hero of the rational, honest and dedicated Left, lives on the Right Bank, in the Rue du Conseiller Colignon, whilst Giscard d’Estaing, the now rejected and spurned representative of the soft Right, lives not far ...”

“... Bruno, had been attacked by sceptical writers like the late 16th-century Frenchmen, Montaigne and Pierre Charron. They mounted two separate arguments, one against the physical sciences and the other against the moral sciences. Against the former, they insisted that plain observations of the world (of the kind fundamental to Aristotelian realist physics) were ...”

“... Louis XVI did not dare to: locked him up for everybody’s good. His origins were humble. Born Pierre-Augustin Caron in Paris in 1732, he was the son of a clockmaker. In one sense, it was an excellent choice of parent, for his century had discovered that the cosmos itself was a clock and its Creator the Great Clockmaker. A man could not have been better ...”

“... had purchased from the Odescalchi of Rome. The chief protagonists were the banker and connoisseur Pierre Crozat, the young Comte de Caylus and the greatest drawings expert of the day, Pierre-Jean Marietie. Between 1721, when first mooted, and the appearance of the first volume in 1729, the project evolved to embrace a ...”

“... something extraordinary which made them noticed at the time, and makes them fascinating to us. Pierre Rivière, Martin Guerre and Menocchio seem to inhabit a Grimms’ fairy-tale world of Grand-Guignol violence, changelings and magic. What about all those who lived ordinary lives and hence are unknown, but who made up everyday reality? How can they be ...”

“... discipline of new methods and concerns: the anthropology-influenced work of the Paris circle of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and J.-P. Vernant, ‘militant feminists’ and political correctness.On this side of the Atlantic the whole PC controversy is something of a phoney war, an attempt by right-wing bulls (the Sunday Times, for example) to reanimate the red rags ...”