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“... them. The books are so gorgeous, so marmoreal, that I find them unreadable. Not unreadable in the Pierre Bourdieu/Edward Bulwer-Lytton sense, and not unreadable in theory – I want to read them, I really do. It’s just that in practice, I don’t. I once got about a quarter of the way through Parkman’s Oregon Trail and have made two or three failed ...”

“... I have read things I haven’t? Absolutely not. I’ve been let off that painful hook by Pierre Bayard, the man who previously showed how the tiresome Hercule had laboured in vain and has now published another brilliant small book (which I swear I’ve read): Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (Minuit, €15). This is a witty and ...”

“... It could have addressed the question of Poussin’s place in French art, but the selectors, Pierre Rosenberg of the Louvre and Neil MacGregor of the National Gallery, opted to avoid controversy, and simply to include the ‘most beautiful’ works. Important paintings that didn’t make the grade were omitted, even when (as in the case of the Richelieu ...”

“... be that Moulin worked with Communists in the late 1930s when he was an aide to the Air Minister Pierre Cot, who became an open supporter of the Party after 1945. He would then have become less enthusiastic about Communism after the fall of the Popular Front Government (which put an end to Cot’s capacity to advance his career) and, more important, after ...”

“... of 1906 and to be reminded that – as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the ...”

“... be had. The two American editors have been joined (and their account of this is a bit grudging) by Pierre Coustillas, who has done more than anyone to keep Gissing studies going and some of the novels in print. He has contributed a history of the Gissing family and a series of useful biographical annotations. Are Gissing’s novels needed now – by more than ...”

“... a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture akin to the so-called ‘photographic’ salon ...”

“... Edmond made on me was that of a wily, mistrustful Auvergnat, rather like a Pompidou or a Pierre Laval. He was much more a Giscard than a d’Estaing. ‘So you believe in your figures, do you?’ he asked me, with a kind of suspicious benevolence. Edmond, in fact, was a remarkable man of business: throughout his life, initially under the auspices of ...”

“... bed before invited (‘for that is no curtasy’), lie straight, and say goodnight after talking. Pierre Broe’s Des bonnes moeurs et honnestes contenances offered similar precepts in 1555. By then, however, there were signs of change. Erasmus’s ‘On the Bedchamber’ was still concerned mainly with consideration for others, but a new note was starting to ...”

“... experiences of ordinary Parisians. In one characteristic vignette, a war-manufactory worker called Pierre Burguburu brings the (unidentified) woman he has just married to the Jacobin Club for their honeymoon, only to learn of Robespierre’s arrest. Dismayed by the ‘flaccidity’ of the club’s response, Burguburu rushes back home – presumably with his ...”

“... was taken over entirely by his need to visit spots mentioned in a novel by one of his heroes, Pierre Loti. Of course his family’s wealth had something to do with all this, but it mostly had to do with Roussel’s freakish gift for preventing the actual world from touching the world he carried inside him. Most of the knowledge we have of Roussel’s ...”

“... was fed back to the East. By the end of the 19th century things had become impossibly tangled. Pierre Loti’s ‘vertiginously self-reflexive fiction’ came close to autobiography. Les Désenchantées, published in 1906, was based on the testimony of two Turkish sisters who had decided to break the monotony of their existence by setting up clandestine ...”

“... which everything else has to fit, or not. An extreme case was the 1992 wedding of the chef Marco Pierre White to the model Lisa Butcher. White was horrified to see his bride coming up the aisle of the Brompton Oratory in a dress by Bruce Oldfield which had no back, hardly any front and quite a lot cut out at the sides. He accused her of dressing for the ...”

“... to Moscow, for example, meeting the two little girls in the garden who are stealing plums, and Pierre’s encounter with the party of Russian soldiers after the battle of Borodino. His diaries have been well used by every biographer, but a proper English version has not appeared before, and Professor Christian has done an excellent job on this selection of ...”

“... classic French cuisine – such chefs as Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel, Jean Delaveyne, Jean and Pierre Troisgros. And it was betrayed, Steinberger says, by the media-savvy chef Paul Bocuse, wrongly identified as a leader of nouvelle cuisine. The new cuisine revolution needed its Trotsky, but what it got in Bocuse was its Stalin. What Bocuse did was to erode ...”