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“... world. Fortunately, we now have a wonderful guide to his thought, in English, by the late Jacques Roger. Buffon’s compendium is a true natural history: a compilation of facts about the form, habits and behaviours of his subjects. He believed that the creatures Linnaeus separated out as ‘Mammalia’ and ‘Aves’ could be ‘connected’ in a ...”

“... Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction’. It is significant that it should bear the date 1979, though, for it is very much a ...”

“... policy has always been run by a cabal operating out of a back door of the Elysée – this was how Jacques Foccart ran it under de Gaulle and Pompidou, orchestrating coups and mercenary interventions at will. Giscard dispensed with Foccart, but was equally underhand. He continued the pattern of military intervention; Africa was his true domaine ...”

“... On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won against the odds. His beginnings were humble, if respectable, and he had progressed by virtue of hard work. He had published brilliant papers on the geological structure of Corsica, which had eventually earned him the respect of a distinguished sponsor, Professor Termier at the Ecole des Mines in Paris ...”

“... aphoristic judgment is usually taken to refer to the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organised by Roger Fry, which opened, in fact, on 8 November 1910. Plainly, this was the moment when the European avant garde shattered the calm of the Edwardian art world. It is still hard to see, however, why it should have changed ‘human character’, or how its ...”

“... serialised in a French paper, as the first instalment of a work purporting to be the life story of Jacques Vingtras, who had his initials in common with the actual author, along with a closely similar, if less than identical childhood and adolescence behind him. (Modern French editions preserve the impersonation by subtitling the volumes ‘...”

“... works in translation, to begin with the curious, and often neglected, Rousseau: Judge of Jean-Jacques, usually known as the Dialogues. This he wrote some five years after his return to France from exile. When it was completed, in 1766, he tried to deposit the manuscript on the great altar of Notre Dame, hoping that news of its existence would thus reach ...”

“... worthwhile books devoted to these figures, there should run such a noticeable vein of anxiety. In Roger Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Peter Sellers, for instance, proper celebration of comic genius goes hand in hand with character assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in ...”

“... about now? Are there any maîtres à penser left? Do we still want such figures? One contender is Jacques Rancière, who recently retired as professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. Rancière emerged at the age of 25 as a co-author, with Althusser, of Reading ‘Capital’ (1965), but broke with him over the revolts of May 1968: Althusser took ...”

“... lustre as his horror stories have been found not to stand up to dispassionate investigation, while Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals catches less attention now that the tenured radicals are spending less time poisoning the minds of the young than dealing with deficits which could reach $50 million a year or more at Yale and Columbia. The quarrels rumble ...”

“... acquisitions for decades. ‘Do you not agree that the fate of the portrait is rather pathetic,’ Jacques-Emile Blanche, an artist famous in his day for his portraits, wrote in a letter to William Rothenstein, who was another – ‘unless the name of the artist be such a famous one that no change in public opinion could possibly prevent them from falling ...”

“... with elegant epistles’ which he had painstakingly written. The opening letter in Roger Kuin’s superb new edition of his correspondence, addressed to the 12-year-old Philip by his father, Sir Henry, urges him ‘to exercise that practise’ in letter writing, ‘for it will stand you in most steed in that profession of lyfe that you are ...”

“... his son, Jean-Christophe, to become his special adviser on African affairs. Ever since the time of Jacques Foccart, the post of Elysée African expert has been synonymous with skulduggery and corruption and, sure enough, Jean-Christophe was forced to resign in 1992 after accusations of corruption, influence-trading and support for authoritarian ...”

“... rumours circulated in Paris political circles about the awesome powers of de Gaulle’s adviser, Jacques Foccart. Foccart had no elected position and was seldom seen, but he was said to have an exclusive hold over France’s African policy, the intelligence services and the whole shadowy world of covert action. Every now and again a coup would occur in West ...”

“... own country. For the rest of the world, however, the book slept in obscurity, till, in 1958, Roger Caillois published a new edition of the first fourteen or so days. It created a considerable stir. The hunt for a complete text was renewed; and, this failing, René Radrizzani produced a reconstruction of it, drawing on various newly-found partial ...”