���ٲ�ë��

Godard was a voracious reader on top of his love of cinema and the sheer weight of references can be bewildering, Barely 70 minutes long, Goodbye to Language, for example, packs in nods to abstract painter Nicolas de ���ٲ�ë��, modernist US author William Faulkner and mathematician Laurent Schwartz.

That grandmother had been none other than Madame de ���ٲ�ë��, the writer, political theorist and famed conversationalist who epitomized France’s brilliant society during the decades before and after the French Revolution.

De Broglie lived in Madame de ���ٲ�ë��’s shadow.

While brief accounts of several hundred dead scholars and public intellectuals militates against sustained reading, a few pages at a time about interdisciplinary giants such as Leibniz, Diderot and Germaine de Stael can be energizing.

Although Burke finds examples of women who were polymaths — he cites Germaine de ���ٲ�ë��, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, among others — their quests were undermined by cultural “niches” available to men but not to women.