“... on me wasn’t there at all, or only passingly, and that my imagination had done the rest. Pierre Bonnard seems to have painted in this way – as a reader rather than a writer. He didn’t paint from life, but made drawings and noted down colours (he also recorded the weather, though that doesn’t seem to change much in his pictures), using them as ...”

“... conversation, as if he were telling you the common sense of the matter.’ The Paris critic Pierre Lalo, a sworn enemy of Ravel’s music, excoriates his ‘petitesse de l’esprit’. There is a superficial rightness about these remarks, and at the same time a profound and distressing misconception at their heart. One doesn’t have to love Ravel’s ...”

“... with my books, which were my only friends.’ He devoured Voltaire, Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Raynal, and filled volume after heavy volume with reading notes. He sketched out a sentimental novel, Clisson et Eugénie, started a history of his native Corsica, and worked feverishly on a Discourse on Happiness which he submitted to an essay ...”

“... from reason and reality’, and against ‘Truth’ itself, by something Flanders describes as I, Pierre by Michel Foucault (this must be I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, Rivière’s autobiography, composed in prison, published in 1975 ...”

“... critique to demystify in order that it might be ‘read’ as distinct from merely consumed (Jean-Pierre Oudart’s ‘Cinema and Suture’ was the benchmark piece, although negotiating its impossibly dense prose is likely to leave the brain de-sutured in ways horrible to contemplate). Against the bad faith of suture, the model of montage was recovered and ...”

“... the Spanish Federal Republic. Although the titles (Figure, Woman) aren’t what Miró promised Pierre Matisse, his New York dealer (‘I will give them titles, since they are based on reality’), the figures are fierce enough to be easily read as expressions of political despair. ‘Still Life with Old Shoe’, 1937 You meet the question of just how ...”

“... a Harmon mute … Europa, the wild dog, her snout in the Pyrenees, licks clean the Gouffre de la Pierre-Saint-Martin below the Pic d’Arles, knocking sideways the steeples of Zaragoza, then slobbering into the Río Jalón. [Golden Gate] Two turkey vultures, wings unfurled like spinnakers, dry and groom themselves, late morning atop Yellow Bluff. The decks ...”

“... someone has been deliberately killed by the administration of a radioactive substance. Marie and Pierre Curie discovered polonium in 1898. They separated tiny amounts from pitchblende, a black mineral dug from the Joachimsthal silver mine in Austria-Hungary. Polonium remained a rarity until the Manhattan Project. The alpha particles it gave off generated ...”

“... principally – are not only spiteful, they have many other qualities, and a few other defects. Pierre Bezukhov, another of our heroes, at one point feels a loathing for everything around him, but also gets ‘a sort of irritating pleasure’ from his loathing. Tolstoy’s famous and much disputed theory of history seems to begin here, in the complicated ...”

“... of a wartime wedding. When Betsy’s sister Agathe later wanted to marry André’s brother Pierre her parents intervened to end the relationship, concerned by Agathe’s dark moods, which were reminiscent of Betsy’s. Both André and Pierre were quite rigid characters who served in the military. An inherent ...”

“... and sexualisation. Like Willis and Sydenham, leading doctors such as Etienne-Jean Georget, Pierre Briquet or Benjamin Brodie saw hysteria as a nervous and, as such, non-gendered disorder. It is to this tradition that Charcot belongs: for him, hysteria was a neurosis caused by a ‘functional’ injury to the nervous system. This is why, in a spirit ...”

“... theft, or a transformation into something new? The question was posed by Borges in his story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939), whose protagonist sets out to write – rather than merely copy – a few chapters of Don Quixote, with his text corresponding to the original word for word. An identical passage – banal and trite when written by ...”

“... is the letter from the father announcing his wife’s death signed Charles when his real name was Pierre? Because this is a nouvelle nouvelle we are to be reminded by these hiccups in the narrative that we are reading fiction and there is no through road to fact. The disclaimer is all the more needed because Contre-Jour has a biographical foundation. It is ...”

“... if, as seems likely, mullah rule in Iran is followed by a strong anti-clerical reaction. Pierre Salinger’s America Held Hostage, an account of the secret negotiations leading to the release of the hostages after 444 days’ captivity, provides a fascinating insight into the power struggle which led to the victory of the mullahs. The hostages were ...”

“... people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre Bonnard. Is he a Great Painter?’ Cahiers d’art asked at the time of his death in 1947. They decided he wasn’t and that only those whose taste was confined to the facile and pleasing would say he was. Nor was he much regarded in America, where a ...”